The killing of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky, earlier this year happened as a direct result of false information given to narcotics officers in order to speed up a multimillion-dollar gentrification plan, lawyers for Taylor’s family alleged in new court documents filed Sunday.
According to the documents, a police squad known as Place-Based Investigations “deliberately misled” detectives into believing that they were targeting one of the city’s largest hubs of drugs and violent crime when they served a no-knock warrant on Taylor’s residence on March 13.
Taylor was caught up in this plot to speed up the city’s “Vision Russell” redevelopment initiative through her association with a man named Jamarcus Glover, the attorneys say. Glover was an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s, and the lawyers say the two were casual friends.
Attorneys say Glover was one of the “primary roadblocks” to redevelopment in the city’s Russell neighborhood because he rented a home on a street that the court documents allege needed to be “cleared out” for the project.
The March warrant that led to Taylor’s killing specifically claimed that Glover had left Taylor’s residence in January with a package and then traveled to a “known drug house.” In an affidavit seeking the warrant, Detective Joshua Jaynes claimed that Glover had received packages at Taylor’s address, but according to a U.S. postal inspector, this was a false statement.
Jaynes is now on administrative reassignment pending an investigation of how and why the search warrant was approved.
Glover was arrested the night of Taylor’s killing for trafficking and firearms offenses, but the court documents claim that law enforcement exaggerated the suspicion around Taylor’s residence in order to clear an easier path for the real estate development project.
“Breonna’s home should never have had police there in the first place,” the attorneys wrote in the filing. “When the layers are peeled back, the origin of Breonna’s home being raided by police starts with a political need to clear out a street for a large real estate development project.”
Louisville officials have denied these motivations for serving the warrant, with the city’s top economic redevelopment official calling the accusations “a gross mischaracterization of the project.”
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