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- Two officers implicated in the death of Breonna Taylor were fired.
- Taylor was shot six when police raided his apartment in Louisville, Kentucky.
- None of the officers was charged with his death.
The Louisville, Kentucky police department on Tuesday fired two officers involved in the case of Breonna Taylor, the African-American woman whose death during a raid became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“@LMPD (will end) the employment of Officer Joshua Jaynes. He applied for the search warrant that led to the tragic murder of #BreonnaTaylor,” tweeted Ben Crump, attorney for Taylor’s family.
READ | Police plead not guilty in Breonna Taylor case
He also shared a termination letter to Jaynes from Louisville Acting Police Chief Yvette Gentry.
An attorney for Detective Myles Cosgrove, another officer involved in the raid, told US media that his client had also received dismissal documentation.
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room attendant, was shot six times after police forcibly entered her apartment while she was sleeping with her boyfriend on March 13.
Police said the boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot them once, giving them cause to return fire, killing Taylor but not hitting Walker.
None of the three officers in the raid was charged with his death.
Black Lives Matter protests
Detective Brett Hankison was fired from the police force in June and charged in September with “senseless endangerment,” for shooting wildly and blindly into adjacent apartments during the raid.
He pleaded not guilty.
Last week’s grand jury indictment of Hankison, but none of the others identified as the officers who shot Taylor, sparked anger and protests in the Kentucky city, and accusations by Taylor’s family of a cover-up to protect police. .
Taylor’s name became a great rallying cry during the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked America in 2020, when people demanded justice for her and many other black Americans who were killed by police.
But early Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announced that it would not indict Cleveland police officers who shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy holding a toy gun in 2014.
Prosecutors “found insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges against Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
“It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment,” says the statement that closes the investigation.
“Although the death of Tamir Rice is tragic, the evidence does not meet these substantial evidentiary requirements.”
“The Rice family has been misled once again by a fair trial,” said Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the Rice family, in a statement to the US media.
Rice was playing in a park with a pellet gun in November 2014 when Loehmann and Garmback, both white, arrived in a patrol car, responding to an emergency call.
In surveillance video, Loehmann is seen shooting Rice twice within seconds of his arrival, after the boy appears to reach for the replica of the firearm on his waist. Officers were not told that the weapon the boy was holding was suspected of being a replica.
In 2015, local prosecutors closed a criminal investigation without pressing charges against the two officers.
Cleveland city officials took steps to discipline the officers in 2017, after a two-year local investigation. Loehmann was fired and Garmback, who was driving the police car, was suspended for 10 days.
City officials said they had found no evidence that any of the officers had violated police procedures. Instead, the two were punished for other violations that emerged during the investigation.
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