As if the family and friends of Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, have not faced enough trauma, the Louisville Metro Police keep adding to the pain. The same officer who claimed earlier this month that Walker is responsible for Taylor’s death is suing Walker for “severe trauma, mental anguish, and emotional distress,” CBS News reported. The officer suing Walker, Jonathan Mattingly, sustained an injury the night Taylor was killed as Mattingly and two other officers executed a no-knock search warrant in Taylor’s apartment on March 13.
"Walker's conduct in shooting Mattingly is outrageous, intolerable, and offends all accepted standards of decency and morality," the lawsuit said. Police officials claim the shot Mattingly received in his thigh required at least five hours of surgery. Mattingly alleges that Walker purposely fired at him knowing he was a police officer despite Walker clarifying that he fired the shot as a warning, mistaking the officers for intruders.
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In a statement obtained by CBS News, Mattingly's attorney, Kent Wicker, said: "Mattingly was shot and nearly killed by Kenneth Walker. He's entitled to, and should, use the legal process to seek a remedy for the injury that Walker has caused him.”
Following the incident, Walker was arrested and charged with attempted murder for Mattingly’s injury. However, charges were later dropped under Kentucky’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows individuals to defend their homes from intrusions. “Even the most basic understanding of Kentucky’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law and the ‘Castle Doctrine’ evidences this fact. One would think that breaking into the apartment, executing his girlfriend and framing him for a crime in an effort to cover up her murder would be enough for them,” Walker’s attorney, Steve Romines, told CBS News. “Yet this baseless attempt to further victimize and harass Kenny indicates otherwise.”
Mattingly has consistently played the victim despite being a murderer. “I’m not going to sit here and act like, playing the big victim card. But I mean, I was a victim in this as well,” he told ABC News’ Good Morning America.
Not only did Mattingly play the victim and openly blame Walker for Taylor’s death, he stated that the officers involved in the case made the mistake of not going into Taylor’s home sooner. So killing Taylor was not a mistake, but going into her apartment at the time that they did was? “We expected that Breonna was going to be there by herself. That’s why we gave her so much time. And in my opinion that was a mistake,” Mattingly said in an interview with Good Morning America. His justification was on the basis that Walker would not have had time to grab a weapon had the officers entered sooner.
“Number one, we would have either served the no-knock warrant or we would have done the normal thing we do, which is [wait] five to 10 seconds. To not give people time to formulate a plan, not give people time to get their senses so they have an idea of what they’re doing,” Mattingly said. “Because if that had happened [...] Breonna Taylor would be alive, 100 percent.”
Mattingly and the officers who killed Taylor still have not faced charges. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron claimed this is due to the jury finding the officers’ actions on the night of the incident justified. However, at least two jurors from the trial have spoken up to say that homicide charges were never presented by prosecutors.
“We didn’t have a choice in that at all, so I was livid,” one grand juror told CBS News on Wednesday. “By the time I heard what he was saying, everything that came out of his mouth, I was saying, ‘Liar.’ ... ‘Cause we didn’t agree to anything. It was a betrayal.”