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Feb. 23 (UPI) -- The sole trial connected to the 2020 Louisville, Ky., raid that killed Breonna Taylor and sparked widespread protests against police violence started Wednesday. The charges aren't related to Taylor's death, but rather the officer accused of recklessly endangering her neighbors by firing into their apartment during a no-knock raid.
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Former Louisville Metropolitan Police Department detective Brett Hankison is charged with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment.
Prosecutors said Hankison fired five shots during the nighttime March 13, 2020, raid. Three of the shots entered the adjacent unit occupied by Cody Etherton, his pregnant partner, Chelsey Napper, and their 5-year-old son.
Hankison didn't fire the shots that killed Taylor. No officers have been charged in her death.
Assistant Attorney General Barbara Whaley described Hankison as displaying "extreme indifference to human life," The New York Times reported, firing blindly from outside the apartment.
Hankison's attorney, Stew Mathews, countered that Hankison's actions were reasonable given the chaotic nature of the scene.
"These officers had no idea what they were getting into," Mathews said at the trial, covered by WDRB Louisville.
Two officers shot Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who worked as an emergency medical technician, during a drug raid linked to an investigation of her ex-boyfriend.
After police broke down the door just after midnight, Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot one officer in the leg. Walker said he believed that they were intruders. Police returned fire, killing Taylor. Investigators found no drugs in Taylor's apartment.
Police fired Hankison two months after the raid. The two other officers involved, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and detective Myles Cosgrove, were fired in December 2020.
Etherton, the first witness Wednesday, testified that the gunshots from Hankison were "inches away from hitting me," ABC News reported.
Etherton said he'd heard a loud sound that night and got up to investigate. A bullet shot through the wall and he dropped to the floor, crawling back to the bedroom.
"Literally, like, one or two more inches and I would have been shot," Etherton said.
He didn't know whether he was being robbed, he added. During cross examination, he described the night as "chaotic."
"From the time that I got woke up to a loud boom, gunfire coming through my wall and nearly killing me, could have struck my girlfriend," Etherton said, "it was chaos."
A jury of 15 people will hear the trial, out of an original pool of 250 to account for the widespread media attention on the case.
Taylor's death -- widely publicized after the May 25 murder of George Floyd -- sparked months of protests against racism and police violence in Louisville and across the country.
