2 officers involved in Breonna Taylor shooting to be fired

A billboard calling for justice for Breonna Taylor.
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Det. Myles Cosgrove and Det. Joshua Jaynes, two Louisville Metro police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor, received notices of termination on Tuesday, their attorneys told The New York Times.

Taylor, an unarmed Black woman, was killed inside her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment in March during a raid; when officers entered her home, Taylor's boyfriend thought they were intruders, and fired his gun. The officers fired back, and Taylor was shot multiple times. An FBI ballistics report determined that Cosgrove fired the shot that killed her. Jaynes prepared the search warrant for the raid, but did not take part in it. In the termination letter sent to Jaynes, Interim Chief Yvette Gentry said he was "deceptive," as he wrote in the warrant that he received information from the U.S. Postal Service, but it actually came from another police officer.

A third detective involved in the shooting, Brett Hankison, was fired in June after it was found he shot 10 rounds from outside the apartment into Taylor's window, in violation of department policy. Because some of those shots entered a neighboring apartment, Hankison was later indicted by a grand jury on three counts of wanton endangerment.

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Since the shooting, Cosgrove and Jaynes have been on administrative reassignment. The FBI is still investigating the case to see if any possible federal crimes were committed, like civil rights violations, the Times reports.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.