Detective Sergeant Kyle Meany spotted Kenneth Walker’s car in the parking lot and sat on the crucial evidence at the warrant hearing. He also didn’t tell the judge that Walker had a concealed carry permit. Just when you were thinking that Breonna Taylor’s death couldn’t get any more controversial, it suddenly did. Not only did Meany hide that important information from the court, he didn’t tell his partners either. They walked into an ambush and it was all his fault.
Hidden evidence was critical
Law enforcement is a key ingredient to a functioning society and police officers need all the help and support they can get. At the same time, they have a duty to the public to play fair. Hiding evidence is never acceptable.
Newly uncovered records reveal that Detective Sergeant Kyle Meany saw something interesting during surveillance, two days before Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by police. He noticed “her boyfriend Kenneth Walker’s car parked nearby and discovered he had a concealed carry permit.”
Meany was well aware that those facts “made the search far riskier.” That’s why he didn’t bother to tell “the team of detectives who executed it, nor did he insist it be included in the application for the search warrant.” That might raise questions he didn’t want to provide answers to.
A former detective admitted to helping mislead a judge into authorizing the raid of Breonna Taylor’s apartment that led to her killing. She admitted to working with another officer to falsify a search warrant application and lying to cover up their act. https://t.co/FQ6w5Sw5Wn pic.twitter.com/VhWDMqDHrQ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 23, 2022
Most importantly, he hid the crucial evidence from “fellow Detective Kelly Goodlett, who prosecutors say would have ‘thrown a fit‘ if she had known the information was withheld.”
The public would never have found out about the controversy but the bombshell new information exploded out of “an addendum to Goodlett’s guilty plea” filed August 23. In it, the government says “it would have been important to share the information” for “safety reasons, among other reasons.”
The evidence was obviously a game changer. Information of a “potentially-armed male at the Taylor residence” would have raised the “risk matrix” for the search. It would have had the team rethinking their strategy about a no-knock raid in the middle of the night, that’s for sure.
No circumstance could justify that
According to the supplement filed by Goodlett’s attorneys, “Detective Goodlett knew from her training, experience, and the typical practices of the LMPD that there is really no circumstance under which the potential presence” of an armed companion with a permit to carry concealed “could justifiably have been withheld.”
Hiding the evidence to defeat the safety protocols led directly to tragedy for all involved.
Ms. Taylor “was shot and killed by police after Walker, believing the couple was being robbed, fired one shot from the apartment that struck Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg; Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove returned fire, killing Taylor.”
DOJ lawyers argue in the supplement, “that if Meany had disclosed the sighting of Walker’s vehicle,” his evidence “would have undermined the claims that Taylor was involved in an ‘ongoing relationship‘ with drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, ‘which was a leading basis for searching Taylor’s apartment in the first place.’”
The evidence also “demonstrated a different, potentially longstanding relationship between Taylor and another man, who also had an association with her address, likewise undermining the basis to search Taylor’s Apartment.”
Detective Goodlett was indicted for violating Taylor’s civil rights. Gestapo General Merrick Garland weighed in on the issue to note “if not for those violations, Taylor would be alive today.“
