Detective Joshua Jaynes, who prepared the search warrant for the botched raid, received notice that he would be terminated, more than nine months after the operation.
The Louisville Metro Police Department has sent a letter of termination to at least one additional officer involved in a deadly raid in which officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency room technician whose death set off a wave of protests in American streets and helped fuel a reckoning over racism. Detective Joshua Jaynes, who prepared the search warrant used to justify the raid, received a letter on Tuesday from the interim chief of police, Yvette Gentry, in which she said she was planning to fire him for violating department polices on search warrants and truthfulness. He had been placed on administrative reassignment following the nighttime raid in March. “These are extreme violations of our policies, which endangered others,” Chief Gentry wrote in the letter, a copy of which Detective Jaynes’s lawyer shared with The New York Times. Thomas Clay, the lawyer, said his client had never lied in getting the search warrant to search Ms. Taylor’s apartment. “They have basically tried to throw him under the bus and he’s not going to fit under the bus because he did nothing wrong,” Mr. Clay said. Detective Jaynes will have an opportunity to respond to the chief’s claims at a department hearing on Thursday, according to the letter. Until now, the only officer held accountable in the case has been Brett Hankison, a detective who had fired 10 rounds from outside the apartment through two of Ms. Taylor’s windows. Detective Hankison was fired in June for violating the department’s deadly force policy and indicted by a grand jury in September on three counts of wanton endangerment because shots he fired entered a neighboring apartment. Mayor Greg Fischer fired the previous police chief on June 1 after a popular restaurant owner was shot and killed as police officers and National Guardsmen attempted to disperse public demonstrations over Ms. Taylor’s death. Chief Gentry, a former deputy chief who had been with the department for two decades before retiring in 2015, took over as interim chief with a promise to clean up the department and increase transparency.
