Episode 18 – Inside the Breonna Taylor Case – Critical Incident Review with Sgt. John Mattingly

Jon Becker: Today's episode of the debrief will discuss the Breonna Taylor case, which has become a flashpoint in the movement to defund and reform law enforcement. There's obviously a great deal of press that has already occurred about this incident. Our goal is not to rehash everything that has been published. Rather, we're going to try to look at the case from the perspective of an individual officer whose life and career were destroyed by this case.

In preparation for this conversation, I read everything I could find about the case. I read the official reports, the news accounts, looked at every picture and video I could get my hands on, and talked to numerous people about the incident. Several things became clear during my investigation.

One, the media reports about the incident were wildly inaccurate initially, and although they have gradually become more accurate, they left most of us with a very inaccurate perception about what happened that night.

Two, that like any tragedy, it was not a single action or actor that created this situation. Rather, it was a complex chain of acts that resulted in the situation spiraling out of control.

Three, that although there were several specific things in Louisville that laid the foundation for this, it is not difficult to see how this could have happened to any police department in the United States in a similar situation.

As a result, our goal today is to try to gather lessons learned that may help other agencies and their officers to prevent this from happening to them, and to hopefully set the record straight on several misconceptions about the case.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is John Mattingly. John is a retired sergeant from the Louisville Police Department who led the search warrant service at the home of Breonna Taylor on March 13th, 2020, and was shot in the leg by her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, before returning fire with another officer, resulting in the death of Miss Taylor.

This event, of course, became a huge catalyst for protests, riots, lawsuits, death threats against the officers, and tragically, the shooting of two more officers while responding to the multi day civil unrest that followed. It has also led to three of the officers involved in obtaining the search warrant, as well as one of the officers involved in the raid being charged with federal crimes. John has recently written a book called 12 Seconds in the Dark that documents the facts of this case from his perspective and discuss the numerous issues that have not been discussed in the media. Jhon, thanks for being here.

I really appreciate you joining me today, man!

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm glad to be here!

Jon Becker: So why don't we start with kind of your background and career, like, walk me through, you know, John's evolution as a cop.

Sgt. John Mattingly: All right. So I came on in June of 2000, and when I came on, I went naturally. Most cops to late watch or graveyard shift, midnight to eight, did that until 2005, September 2005. I went to what's called a flex unit. It's kind of like a narcotics unit inside of each of our, one of our eight divisions. And I did that until 2009, September 2009, so, right at four years.

And that's when I got promoted to sergeant. Wasn't going to take the test, but my boss at the time looked at me and she said, man, are you seeing all these people that are getting promoted? And I was like, yeah. She said, a bunch of idiots, aren't they? I'm like, heck, yeah, they are. She said, do you want to work for them or do you want to work with them? I went, good point. I guess I'll take the test. So I took it. I got promoted on September 11 of 2009 and went back to late watch for a year. And my body couldn't stand it because at that time, I was a little bit older. I didn't come on till I was 27.

So, you know, here I am, nine years in at this point, and kids running around the house, couldn't get any sleep. So I did that for a year. And then in 20, I guess, 2010, I went to detective sergeant position. Did that for a year and a half. We took everything except business, robberies and homicides. Everything else we did. Enjoyed it. Got to learn a lot, but at the same time, just wasn't my speed. I missed the adrenaline, missed the jump out on people, all that.

So I went back to the flex unit as a sergeant. That only lasted about six months. And the crime in Louisville just kept going up and up and up. And so they put together with a violent crime unit called Viper. And the guy who was starting that unit called me and said, hey, will you come be one of my sergeants?

And I liked the guy, but I didn't want to work for him. One of those guys. Yeah, super smart, but always let you know how smart he was, all that stuff. Yeah, great cop, but I was like, no, I'm good. He cussed me out, hung up the phone, had some of the guys that were gonna go to that unit that he'd kind of handpicked, kind of work on me, work on me, work on me.

So, a couple weeks later, he called me back. I said, okay, fine, I'll do it. So, went to do that, and from 2012 to the end of 2015, I did that. And best time of my career. It was the busiest, the hardest I've ever worked, but most fun I have had and just had more positive results. You know, it wasn't just dope. It was getting guns and murders and carjackers and all that stuff off the street almost in real time, because the guys that worked for me were.

I mean, they're much better detective than I ever was, and. And they knew how to round people up on social media. And within hours of shootings and homicides, we were grabbing these guys up. And so it was a good time. And then new command came in. The department kind of changed everything up in that unit wasn't what it was before. Turned into some kind of pr thing for the city. I said, this ain't me. I'm out. And I bounced from that unit, went back to a flex unit as a sergeant for about a year, and then I went to our major narcotics unit in 2017 and was there until the time of the incident in 2020.

Jon Becker: So, over the course of your career, how many, you know, you worked narcotics for quite a few years. How many warrants you think you served?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, around 2000.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, I mean, this is an active narco unit that's doing a lot of warrants.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, I mean, there were days. There were days we were doing three and four warrants. You know, we just piggyback one off the other onto the next. Onto the next, and work, you know, 14, 16 hours. So very busy, very proactive. Good time.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the, you know, the incident. First, let's start with the warrant. Why did Louisville PD seek a warrant for Breonna Taylor's apartment?

Sgt. John Mattingly: All right, well, a new unit had been formed in January of 2020. It was called the place based investigation. It was from a pilot program out of Cincinnati that specifically targeted individuals within the city. Like, you would take somebody who had a bunch of complaints, there was a repeat offender who was a nuisance, and they would pinpoint that person, and that was going to be their only target until they wrapped up a good case on them and prosecuted. Then they would move to the next, unlike most units that have, you know, 10, 12 things going at one time, they were all the. The entire unit was going to focus on these one problems and just kind of knock them off one by one.

Jon Becker: Were those problems people based or place based would imply its location?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Mainly community based. Now, come to find out, we think it was the mayor's way of gentrifying this community, because on Elliott Avenue, which is where the main target and where the two of the warrants were served that night, there were two residences left on this street that the city had not retained control over.

Jon Becker: So were they, like, imminent domain in the houses?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, no, they were going in some of them imminent domain, but a lot of them they were using where you would go in. If you had more than three citations on that location, within six months, the city could actually come in and take your property, or at least they could shut it down until you went through court. They had bought most of the properties for about a dollar apiece, was what they were doing from these people. So they basically were strong armor them because it was in a lower income in community, and so you had a lot of poor people.

So these houses were 95% rental houses. So you had these landlords just renting to people, and. And the city would come in and go, oh, you had these violations, whether it be the gutters down, dope sold from the house, all these different things they could use to obtain these properties, we'll come to find out in 2018 or 2017. The city had had drawings already written up and done for this area where they were going to put in a fountain and new buildings and a walking area and all this stuff.

Jon Becker: All the standard gentrified yoga shop.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Exactly.

Jon Becker: You know, place that sells fancy ice cream.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Just totally changed this part of the communities. It was the goal, but they couldn't get rid of these two houses. They were pain in their side. And I've actually got a map that was given to me by somebody from the inside that showed all the X out houses they had in the two they needed, and it was the two that they happened to be doing these warrants on.

Jon Becker: Interesting!

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, very, very big coincidence. So the main target, Jamarcus Glover, he's a guy from Mississippi, had several felonies down there. At the time of this warrant, he had five or six open pending felony cases in Jefferson county, which is Louisville, all for drugs and guns. So he's a repeat offender? Repeat offender. Kept letting him out.

Well, in January of 2020, he got locked up. Some buddies of mine from another unit had done a warrant on the same house on Elliott. Got Jamarcus Glover. I think it was seven guns. Four of them were rifles, three pistols, some heroin, cocaine, different things like that. Breonna Taylor bailed him out of jail, and she used her address as his – When they pulled all the records for the Jamarcus Glover, everything came back to Breonna's house. His car was registered there, his phone was registered there. His bank account was at her house. She bailed him out and used that address as his. So everything pointed to Breonna Taylor's apartment.

Jon Becker: As maybe where he's living, or at least, you know, right adjacent to him, so to speak.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. And during the course of this, this three month investigation, they have videos of him going in empty handed, coming out with packages, going straight to the track trap house on Elliot from her house on Springfield. They had po cams up on Elliot. They had trackers on his car, pings on his phone. So they knew that occasionally he was going to Breonna Taylor's house and then leaving.

There's a couple of times she actually drove him down to the trap house, and they have her on video down there. So that tied her to them. The whole purpose of going to her apartment that night wasn't for Jamarcus Glover. Like, like everybody says on the news, we. They knew where he was.

And again, this was originally signed as a no knock because of Jamarcus, because of his criminal history. And once they figured out he was not going to be at that location, due to the surveillance, when we were at the briefing that night, they said it signed as a no knock, but we're going to do a knock and announce because it no longer fits the parameters.

So in that case, they were doing the right thing because what they had presented to the judge no longer met those parameters anymore. And so they bumped it back to a knock and an ounce.

Jon Becker: So the idea of the no knock is basically, if in fact, it's the location where he is, he's probably armed.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. He's run from the police before.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You're gonna go in quick and take him into custody.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay, let's go back for 1 second, though. So she, Breonna Taylor is his girlfriend at that at this point or?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not in 2020. At this point, yeah. Off and on for about seven years, they've been boyfriend and girlfriend, broken up, gotten together. Broken up, gotten together.

Jon Becker: But there's, I mean, there's a relationship between the two of them that is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well documented, still current. Yes.

Jon Becker: And he's using her address to, you know, to receive things and using it almost as a home address.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Yeah. And that's typical in the drug trade. And, you know, a lot of your listeners will understand that, that these guys don't put things in their name. They put it in girlfriends, baby mamas, whoever's grandma's name. It doesn't matter. They use their location to spread out their drugs and money, because if the police hits one place, hopefully they'll miss the other spot.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And later, we found out from jail phone calls that Brianna was, in fact, holding Jamarcus Glover's

money that night and other drug dealers in their little organization. And JaMarcus Glover's girlfriend got mad at him. It's all on jail phone calls of, you know, why is she holding your money? He's like, well, she's holding everybody's money. It's just what she does.

So she was definitely tied into it. I don't think. I don't think she was out there slinging the dope herself, but I. But she knew of the organization. She knew what was going on.Jon Becker:

Yeah. I mean, like, best case scenario, she's just dirtbag adjacent.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And there was something about a rental car, too, right? Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: In 2017, she rented a car. A few days later, there was a body found in the trunk that had been shot. That case has never been solved. That person was tied to the organization of Jamarcus Glover, somebody they knew. When the police asked her about it, she just simply said, I don't know what happened to the car got stolen or so.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you can see where if you're a judge and you're presented with this, with a warrant for her house, you know, with supporting affidavits, you're going to grant a search warrant to go search the house. Because worst case scenario, Jamarcus Glover's there. Best case scenario, you may find drugs, money, property. Etcetera. Okay. So it's a different unit that does the workup on this. It's the place based investigations unit that does the workup on this. When do you first get word of the warrant?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So this is kind of the tricky part. So in January, when they first began this case, at this point, I'd move from our major case division over to our parcel interdiction unit, where we took packages from UPS, FedEx. The lead detective came to me and said, hey, can you look up this address, 3003 Springfield, number four, and see if Jamarcus Glover has any packages coming there? Well, I knew from experience that even if he were having packages sent there, it's not going to be in his name. They always use some crazy fake names so they can have, you know, plausible deniability.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And if it shows up and the girl has it, she can go, this ain't mine. Look at the name on it. You have no idea whose it is. This happens all the time. And we've done several reverses that way where we've locked people up, or we've delivered the package and gone and done the warrant. So he comes to me and he says, hey, can you look up this address? I said, who's it through? He says, through the postal service.

I said, well, josh, we have zero connection with the postal service, because a couple years before I came to this unit, the postal inspector and LMPD got into a big, you know, p****** contest, to say it nicely, and I. And they took their ball and went home, and we no longer dealt with them. I didn't have any connections with them. Didn't even know him, never met him.

So when he came to me and said that, I said, I don't know who. I don't know anything about that, but I know who does. I knew the. The smaller department, Shively police department, which is one of the small ancillary departments around there. They had picked up with postal because they also had a little unit that went out and did this stuff.

So I reached out to him, text him right there while he's standing next to me, and I said, hey, do you have anything on Springfield in Jamarcus Glover's name? He said, man, I don't know about Springfield, but we do have a Jay Glover. I can't remember the first name that we just got a package off of. He said, I'll get back with you. I showed Josh the text, exchanged their phone numbers, thought I was done with it.

A couple weeks later, I'm at UPS pulling packages, and I see one of the detectives from Shively, and I said, hey, man, did you all ever figure out that. That thing I text you about last week about Glover, or a couple weeks ago? And he said, yeah, me and Kelly Goodlett, who was the other, the co lead on this case, he said, she called me.

We were talking about it. We were comparing vehicles of the two glovers, figured out it's a different glover. Theirs is like a Jason Glover, and this was JaMarcus Glover. So just kind of a weird coincidence, but a different glover. They knew that at that point. I said, cool, no problem. Not my case. Don't really care. Didn't mean that in a bad way, but we're so busy, don't have time to keep track of other people's cases.

The next day, I'm in the office. Josh is walking by me, and I stop him and say, hey, man, did you hear? They've got. It's a different glover. There's no packages. He said, yeah, man. Kelly told me. I was hoping to just do a rip reversal. Now we gotta write all these warrants. Sorry, dude. Went on our way. That's the last I thought I was gonna hear of it.

In March, 1 week of March, we get an email sent to all of narcotics saying, we've got a. A multi warrant, simultaneous that's coming up, that we. That we need bodies on manpower intensive. They sent out the addresses. Elliott Avenue. Elliott Avenue. Muhammad Ali. Another address down in our urban area, west end, where it's super ghetto. And then. Then they had the one on Springfield. What? This point, I had erased Springfield from my mind. And it also didn't have JaMarcus Glover's name on it, had Breonna Taylor's.

So I'm not putting two to two and two together at this point, because in parcel interdiction, we're doing 40, 50 warrants a week that I've got to go through and approve. And if it's not a case we're actively working, you just flush that info and you move to the next one. I'm not that smart, or I'd do something different. Be a cop. So when they send that out, I look at the addresses, and I'm like, man, I can help that night because it's overtime. Who doesn't like overtime?

But I don't want to be down the ghetto. I've done this for years. I've been down there so much. I don't want to dig through a nasty trap house. I don't want to deal with the crowds. I said, give me the. If you give me the apartment, I'll help out. And so their sergeant sent back and said, fine, you got it. So two weeks later, we come in for the brief, and that's when we go. And I see the no knock, no knock, and then knock and announce on the board for Springfield.

Jon Becker: So how many warrants were being simultaneously served that night?

Sgt. John Mattingly: They had five signed. They were going to do three at the same time as long as they had him in custody and then go to the next two, because one was, I think, mom's house and one or girlfriend's house, and then the actual baby mama's house.

Jon Becker: So. And this is arrest warrants and search warrants?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, simple search warrants.

Jon Becker: Simple search.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay, so the three locations that they decide they're gonna hit, two of them are on Elliott Elliot Avenue, and the other one is Breonna Taylor's apartment.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you get tasked with Taylor's apartment.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: So your warrant is a no knock.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Warrant signed that way. Yes.

Jon Becker: Signed as a no knock, which was done so that if Jamarcus Glover was there, you had the capability to go in and execute it. No knock. Correct. But at the point that you get handed the warrant, they've already determined that he's on Elliot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And that's where his phone is pinging, and, like, you know, everything's pointing to. That's where he is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. The phrase they used, I specifically remember this was, we're going after this house for documents and money. Possible dope. We don't think there's any there, but possible. They said she's a heavyset black female. Give her extra time to come to the door, because generally, on a knock and announce you're 10 seconds at the door, then you're going through.

So they asked us to give her extra time initially to keep the neighbors out of it because they were hoping she'd jump on the team. And I, you know, because she wasn't the target. You know, they were going after documents to tie Glover into this different organization where he had about five guys working for him.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The target of the investigation is Jamarcus Glover.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: She's just, you know, an acquaintance, peripheral. Yeah. Okay, so then you get. You get the warrant. They decide it's not gonna be a no knock. Who's serving the other two warrants?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT. Serving both of those.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you SWAT hitting two locations simultaneously, and you guys are doing the third location.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. We were on swatch frequency, so when they said, we're unmounting here and heading in, that's when we were moving in.

Jon Becker: Got it. Simultaneous, just to, you know, provide element a surprise and make sure somebody doesn't make a phone call, and evidence gets destroyed and all that. But your primary objective is simply evidence against Jamarcus?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. The goal was not even to lock her up. That was never relayed to us. That was never – Hey, we're getting her. She's going downtown. That's it. It was simply, get in there, let's find some evidence against Jamarcus, then we can tie her in and maybe get her to flip.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so talk to me about the team. You are assigned to execute this warrant.

Sgt. John Mattingly: There were seven of us. I know all the guys, obviously because they work in some facet in narcotics. One of the guys actually worked for me in parcel interdiction, so I'd serve, and he was with me in Viper. So we had served multiple, multiple warrants over the years together. There was another guy that used to work with me, but he was in the highway interdiction. We served some warrants together, not a lot.

And then I had a guy from a street platoon that I didn't serve many warrants with. I had occasionally, you know, here and there, because we were always plugging in bodies when you needed them. Had a guy from the play space unit that I'm not sure I've ever served a warrant with him. Maybe one, but I'm not even sure on that. Then we had a lieutenant who, you know, generally just doesn't come out for warrants, but with bodies needed, we had a lieutenant on scene.

Jon Becker: So seven guys, six different units. As a unit, these guys had never worked together.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Like you worked with a couple of guys and a couple of guys in the unit might have worked with each other, but as a unit you are – this is the first time you are together.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. This isn't a team that normally went out and hit doors.

Jon Becker: Got it. And like, what's the experience level in this seven guys, you've got a couple thousand more. And you've been working a long time in narcotics. Is it a real wide variance in skillset?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It depends on how you put that there, because there's guys that have had many years on, but. And even some of them in narcotics, but they hadn't done a lot of dynamic entry warrants. So you still had, I think between the seven of us, there was probably about 140 years of experience out there, but in different areas. Like one guy had been a beat guy his first 21 years, and he'd only been in a specialty unit for a couple year and a half. Only done, man, one or two warrants that I know of.

So you had some guys that were pretty fresh to this. Not fresh to be in police officers, but fresh to being in this type of unit. And then other guys that had been in these units, but again, just hadn't worked. Hadn't worked together.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they had the experience, but they just hadn't had been. Had played the same team, so to speak. So in narcotics at this point in Louisville PD. And I suspect that this has changed now, but I mean, I hope it is. What is when you come into an arc unit? What kind of training are you getting?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, I mean, this has been a complaint for years. I don't care if you're going to homicide, narcotics division, detective. There's not a lot of, you know, you go to the old guys like it used. When I first came on, the department was so old or filled with older guys, middle guys and young guys that you had all that experience to lean on. And even if you weren't leaning on them, if you did something wrong, they were reaching out to you, smacking you upside the head, telling you what you're doing wrong.

Well, as the department grew or not grew, as the department actually shrunk, but as time went on, the department got a lot younger, and as those old guys matriculated out, there wasn't a changing of the guard as far as, hey, we're bringing new guys in because we know these guys are, they're gone in six months.

So let's transfer this knowledge to the new guys. And every time a new crew came in, it was like recreating the wheel. So then you're, it's back to the basics, starting all over, re digging in. And the training just wasn't very good. I mean, you'd have, you know, send a guy to a week or two week narcotic school and that would be it.

Jon Becker: And in that school, he may do two days of high risk entries.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah, it was. It's so much information in a week or two that you can't. You're not proficient at it.

Jon Becker: Well, and you and I talked about this earlier, but like, it's, you know, narcotics as you're working, it is, you know, 95% detective work.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And then there's this search warrant component.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. So you've got to be good at handling informants, surveillance on following people, and then you've got this facet at the end that the carrot at the end of the stick of doing your entry and doing your search warrant, collecting your evidence.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So you go to briefing the decisions made that it's not going to be a dynamic warrant. You're going to do a knock and announce. When do you first see the location?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So when we went to our second secondary location to meet up after the main brief, everybody goes to their different areas where they're going to be meeting up, met up with EMS, met up with the guys. And I said, hey, I'm going to go buy this location. Because the six of us that were out there, there was one guy on the eye who was watching the apartment that guy was part of the play space unit, so he knew what he was looking at. He knew what the investigation detail entailed. But us six over here knew nothing about it.

Jon Becker: And he's not leading the warrant you're leading.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm leading the warrant. He's simply the eye on it. Just tell us what's coming and going. You know, he knows what they look like in case they come in or out. So I'm like, man, I've got to go by and see this. You know, we don't have a true VO or verification officer, so I've got to at least go by and know what I'm going to, I don't want to hit the wrong door. You know, you don't want to do something stupid. So I go by and I'm on the phone with him, and he. He directs me into the location of where it's at.

So at least I got a vision of it. And these are eight plex apartments. You've got. They're actually 16 plex, but you've got in, they're split in two, and you've got four units on the bottom, four units on the top. If you're looking directly at the apartment, it's a breezeway inset with a metal staircase on the right. You've got two doors on the back wall and then a door on the right and a door on the left that are kind of looking at each other.

Jon Becker: So all four apartments on the bottom open into the same common breezeway area.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: And two doors are facing you as you're walking up. And two doors are on the sides.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And her door was the one on the right as you're walking up underneath the staircase.

Jon Becker: Okay. So you have to go around the staircase.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, it's kind of offset to the right. So the middle of the walkway kind of leads you to the left of it. You don't really have to go around it. You're walking right by.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you walk right past it. But when you. When you go to her door, it's kind of overhanging.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And it's overhung by the staircase.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so you. You go drive by and have a look. And to go back. Are you given any maps of the location, any floor plans, any data in your briefing?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, it was pretty generic. It was like, you know, the main emphasis was on Jamarcus, Glover and Elliott on those locations. And then this was almost like a, like a secondary, like a side piece, if you would say. Yeah, it's like okay. We're also doing this, so go do it and see what you get.

Jon Becker: So SWAT had not scouted it. No place based investigation.

Sgt. John Mattingly: They didn't even know we were doing it.

Jon Becker: Interesting. Okay. And they were in a different briefing, I take it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. So SWAT briefs at their office. We briefed it together because they've got, I don't know, 35 guys. They were using 40 guys. We had 40 on our end. And there's conflicting reports. The guys in the unit say no. When we went with SWAT a couple weeks earlier to start this ball rolling, we told them about the location, tell them what was going on.

Apparently, that wasn't related to their commanders, so they're saying it wasn't told. So it was miscommunication from the start. That kind of started to snowball. And as we talk, you'll see there's just been. It was mistake after mistake.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Well, it's one of the things I said in the intro is, like, you know, the problem with all these kinds of things is never one big blunder.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Right. It's a chain of events of sometimes seemingly inconsequential decisions. And sometimes, you know, people taking bad action, sometimes people doing what they think is the right thing. But. But all of those little things add up to lay the groundwork. That's why I want to kind of, as we're walking through this, I want to talk through, like, okay, what about this? What about this?

So you go, you look at the location, drive by, figure out where the apartment is. The guy on the eye from the place. Place investigations, I'm assuming, is telling you like that, you know, that's the apartment.Sgt. John Mattingly:

Yeah. There was a heating cooling air van right in front of the breezeway. He said, when you get to that van, it's right there to the right. Bottom door on the right. So when I got there, I tapped my brakes. He said, that's it. So at least I knew what it looked like where we were going to.

Jon Becker: Got it. Is the apartment marked? Like, is there, like, an apartment number on it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Number four.

Jon Becker: Okay. And did you notice anything else when you did your drive by?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I noticed the first time I noticed the bedroom light or the bedroom TV. You could see it flickering through her shades.

Jon Becker: So as you're looking at the front of the building, her apartment is on the front of the building.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. And to the right of the breezeway.

Jon Becker: To the right of the breezeway. And you're looking at the outside of the building. What do you see as far as windows and doors and stuff?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So if we start at the breezeway. To the right of it there's a sliding glass door and there's a little small wooden type fence blocking that off or going around it.

Jon Becker: So like a little courtyard or a little garden kind of area?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Little bitty area.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And to the right of that is the secondary bedroom window. And then to the right of that is the main bedroom where the TV was on.

Jon Becker: Do you know that or do you know that now?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I know it now when I saw the TV flickering. And most apartments are laid out fairly similar. So in my mind I kind of put two and two together and thought, well, that's probably the master bedroom where they're watching TV.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Or where she is. Cause we were told no kids, no dogs, no boyfriends. That's the intel we had. Just her.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And you and I joked about that earlier. No house ever has kids, dogs or guns. But they all seem to have kids, dogs and guns. So to go back to the apartment, if. If you're looking at the front, you've got the secondary bedroom, primary bedroom, little courtyard kind of gardening area with the sliding glass doors. Just big windows. Like. Like sliding windows or normal windows on the two bedrooms?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, they're normal windows. Just that kind of go up.

Jon Becker: Got it. And those are covered with blinds, if I remember correctly.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: So you can't see in. You can just see that the TV's on.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. You knew the TV was on. You could see it flickering through the shades.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So then just to get one more detail about the layout of the apartment, when the front door opens to the apartment, you're looking straight down a hallway, if I remember correctly.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. Yeah. About 30 ft down a hallway, you've got a. If you're looking through the door, the living room is on the right, the kitchenette is on the left. There's like a small dining room that leads into a small kitchen. Then there's a hallway right down the middle, a bathroom to the left, and then an insert inset to the right in that inset or the opening to both bedroom doors.

So the hallway is only about 3 ft wide, very narrow. And then at that first bedroom, the wall actually cuts inside, so it can give you concealment but not covered.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: If that makes sense.

Jon Becker: But the two bedrooms are opening off of a common alcove like it's a wall until it dents in. And the two bedrooms both open off that common space.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay. So when you're looking down the hallway of the apartment, you know, we're standing at the front door, we look all the way down the hallway to the right and back is where her bedroom is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay. All right. So then I – You do your scout. You have a quick look, go back stage. Then what happens?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT calls and says they're in route. And then as they get close, we, you know, we line our cars up. We. We start down. And as we're pulling into the parking lot and circling around to unmount from our vehicles. I see a white Toyota sequoia sitting parked right behind the van. But it's nothing parallel to it is perpendicular, so it wasn't in a parking space. It's like somebody pulled up and jumped out.

And in my mind, I'm thinking, why don't I know this? You know, where was the eye on this? Did he fall asleep? Did he just miss it? Did he see where they went? And it was across the street? Inconsequential. I don't know. We weren't told. So I was a little upset, you know, a little ticked off about it. And I'll be. I'll be honest, I was a little. Not complacent. But when you do so many of these, it's kind of procedure. You know, you're just going through the motions. But when I saw that, the radar went up a little bit. Because I'm like, man, I don't know where if. Is this a threat?

Jon Becker: Yeah, that could be Jamarcus Glover, for all you know.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Where did they go? What apartment they go into? Because they're parked right in front of ours. So as I tell the guys, I'm gonna pull up to it and get out. They stayed back. They unmounted back, did the normal approach from, you know, 20, 30 ft back, whatever it was. I pulled up behind the car that was concealed by the van, my car washing. I get out, I look through the car.

I remember seeing a pink baby seat in the back and a bunch of trash. But nobody was in the vehicle. I circle around the front. I make my way through the breezeway. They come up behind me. I'm underneath the staircase at this point. And we've all in a stack as best we can. It's a very small area. So I've got one guy behind me. And then we're kind of split. I'm to the left of the door. Because the door swung from right to left as it opened up. So from the living room toward the kitchen.

Jon Becker: So the door swings into the left side. Right doorknob's on the right hand side.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As you approach it, and I'm on the left. And then we got the breacher on the right. And it was so small, the rest of the guys were on the right, kind of wrapped around the staircase.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. And just to this will probably become relevant in a second, but the car that's parked in front, I'm assuming that's the guy that's in the apartment upstairs picking up his kid.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay, so we've got a guy who has pulled up and is going to pick up his daughter. Daughter?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I think it was a daughter. Yeah.

Jon Becker: The baby at the apartment up above.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Directly above Breonna Taylor.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, right above where you are, which will come into play in a second here.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. All right, so your stage at the door, what happens next?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So the initial thought was, let's just knock normal, like we're delivering a pizza or something, see if she can come to the door. Because they didn't want the neighbors involved. We'll do this discreetly. We'll get inside the apartment. We'll do our thing. We'll get out of.

Jon Becker: And you're in a neighborhood where the police hitting a house is going to be like neighborhood entertainment, I'm assuming. Yeah. And have a look.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes, but it's not as common as the area they're in down on Elliott. Okay, so this wasn't a predominantly black community. This wasn't a predominantly poor community. It was kind of. Kind of middle of the road. What, middle class?

Jon Becker: Lower middle class working families.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And you had a mix of hispanic, black, white, all kind of interlaced in here. So the idea that, you know, the police were there isn't abnormal, but it's not as frequent as they're gonna see down on Elliott.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So you decide you're gonna knock, see what happens.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we knock a couple times. I knocked a couple times, got no response. So at that point, I did the open hand. Police knock loud. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Police. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Come to the door. After the first knock, all of a sudden, I hear my lieutenant and Detective Hankinson address somebody tell them to get back in the apartment. Get back in the apartment. Well, I can't see what's above me because there's a concrete landing and I'm right below it.

But I know they're addressing somebody because I glance out of the corner of my eye, on my peripheral, and I see them engaging someone up top. This goes on. I just ignored in the beginning as they're conversing back and forth. This guy's arguing with him. For whatever reason, he didn't want to go back inside.

And so I knock a second time. Well, they're still going at it, and this has probably been 10 seconds at this point, which seems an eternity when you're at a door. And so I simply said, brett, let it go. Relax. And that wasn't anything on Brett. That was just simply saying. That was just the terminology that came out of my mouth.

Jon Becker: Relax.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Because I needed focus on the door and away from that was distracting people.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And so the guy went back in the apartment. We focused back on the door, continued knocking. About six cadences total of knock and announce. On the one right before the last one, the breacher nobles said, hold on, I think I heard something inside. So I stopped listening for a second, didn't hear anything. Yelled again, police. Search warrant. Didn't hear anything. Knocked one more time, yelled, police, search warrant. Looked back at my lieutenant, and he gave the nod to go ahead. And at this time, we've been at the door at least a minute, probably 45 seconds, but probably about a minute.

Jon Becker: Well, long enough for them to get out of bed, get dressed, and be in the hallway.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. With the gun.

Jon Becker: With a gun, yeah. That's about to come into play here, so. Okay, then what do you do?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So, Mike hits the door the first time, and he hit right on the deadboat, and. Which, you know, is a no no. And it didn't do anything. It dented the door a little bit, but that was it. And I remember somebody. Somebody in the background yelling, hey, my daughter hits harder than that. So everybody kind of laughed, as, you know. As you do.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Second time, he hit it. Hit it flush and almost knocked it open. I could see through to the living room. I could see the dead boat was bent. And I said, here we go. And he hit it a third time, and it flew open. With that time. I can see from right to left, I can see the couch. I can see the curtains on the window. I can see the wall. There was a picture on the wall. And I – From right to left, I'm slicing the pie. And I get to where the door frame on the left side of the door and the. The wall for the hall meet, I can no longer see anymore. Can't see down the hall. Can't see in the kitchen to the left. All I can see is the living room.

Everybody at this point, please. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Now, this is pretty quick. You know, the. The cutting and slicing the pies, maybe 2 seconds.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Boom, boom, boom, boom. At that point, as soon as I step from left to right into the door frame and my gun light goes from right to left, I come up on the. I can see the end of this gun. I could see it was silver, and. But the first thing my mind did, as I'm turning right to left, I'm seeing two people, but they're overlapping. It's like one big blob at the end of this long hall. Long, dark hall. And you got the ambient light from the tv coming out of the room. Now you've got the. The law. The light from the hallway kind of coming in, giving a weird look. And then you've got our, you know, mounted our gun lights.

So as I'm going right to left, I'm going, man, something's not right here. My brain, even though this is super quick, my brain's thinking all these weird things, like, this is weird. Normally, people run, they hide, they try to escape, they give up, or they fight. But I've never had two people waiting at the end of a hallway just standing there.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's weird.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So. And I knew in my mind, I assumed one was a guy and one was a girl because one was taller, one was shorter. But I couldn't make their face out. I couldn't have picked them out of a lineup, because my focus went right on that gun that was extended out. So if you're looking down the hall, Kenneth Walker's to the right, Breonna's to the left.

Jon Becker: So he's closer to the bedroom, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: He's. He's at that little insert, that little in cut that goes to both bedroom doors. As soon as I see the gun, I think, oh, crap. I mean, it was so quick. As soon as I saw the gun, the flash, the bang, the smack in the leg, I felt it. I returned four shots. It felt like it was simultaneous. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But evidently, there was enough of a gap in there for him to dive out of the way in this doorway.

When that happened, I went behind the door frame, and I came back out and shot where I thought he dove into. And what we didn't know at the time, and we know now, looking at the pictures, was Breonna Taylor tried to follow him into that door. And her feet where she was on the left side of the hall. If you're looking down the hall, her feet ended up on the right, actually past the threshold of where he ran into that little indention. And then she fell back against the wall.

So after I got shot, I felt my leg. After I got out of the way, I said, man, I've been hit. And I knew it was bad, because, you know, on the street, I've seen hundreds of people shot, and if it's just a through and through leg wound, there's a little blood, but it's not catastrophic, you know, it's not a lot. And as soon as I put my hand out of my leg, my palm was just soaked, and I thought, oh, man, this hit my femoral artery. So I yelled that out, man. I've been hitting my femoral.

And at that time, I go down, and miles kind of steps over me and a little bit on me, and he's returning fire down the hallway. And all this, again, is so quick, man. We can explain it, but unless you're there, the speed at which these things go is just tremendous.

Jon Becker: That's 12 seconds, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. From the time that door opened and he shot till it was complete silence was 12 seconds. And that's with three, four, four different people firing, people moving. You know, all this stuff happening. So, as I go down, miles steps up and shoots. I kind of zone out for just a half a second. Then I come to him, like, I can't sit here. I'm gonna get shot with crossfire.

So I get up, and I hobble out, and I go behind miles as he's firing. I go to the curb, and as I'm stepping off the curb, I forget about my leg, and I step down, and I fall between the cars. Well, simultaneously, miles is done shooting, and there's, like, maybe a half second, three quarter of a second, real quick break. And then I hear gunfire again, but it sounds different because it's no longer in this. In this inset, you know, down here.

Jon Becker: Where all the metal alcove, and.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, you're not getting the echo. You're not getting all that stuff. There was a different sound, and it was multiple guns, shots. I mean, just quick. And I thought. My mind, I thought, holy crap, they're still shooting at each other, you know, even though it's quick. That seemed like a lot of shots and come to find out, that was Brett moving to a secondary location, thinking we were getting assassinate the doorway. And, you know, he's firing through the. Through the windows, trying to get them to stop shooting.

So I instantly said, man, I need a tourniquet. Need a tourniquet. My lieutenant comes over, drags me back behind the sequoia, and he doesn't have a tourniquet on him. It's a lieutenant. Lucky they have guns on him. So he pulled his belt off. He tried to put it on. Mike nobles, the guy that was the breacher, had come out at this point, because when I came out, he was kind of stuck behind the stair between the stairway and the shots being fired, so he couldn't exit. He was kind of stuck up against the wall.

So at this point, he had arrived about the same time I got pulled out, and they stuck that leather belt on me and. And pulled it, and it wasn't working. You know, he was stepping on my leg, pulling. But the blood was just. It was just slipping off the leather. So that's a myth, guys. Don't try that. It does not work.

Jon Becker: You need a winless for a tourniquet to work.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. And so right at that time, Tony James comes around the corner, and he has a tourniquet in his hand. The lieutenant takes it, puts it on, and, you know, thank God, at least he paid attention in tourniquet class, because that saved my life.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because it hits your femoral artery.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah. Rip through it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you end up having to have an entire section of about a five.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And a half hour surgery that took, I think, about six inches of the artery out. Took a vein out of my leg, replaced it with that. And I don't know what they call it. Not fusing. They call it something grafting. Yeah, grafted the vein in.

Jon Becker: Okay, so, at this point, Breonna Taylor's in the hallway. She's been shot six times, if I remember correctly. Five or six times.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was five. They think the fifth one ricocheted off something and came out a different hole. So they said probably five, but they counted six since there was an extra hole.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Sgt. John Mattingly: They didn't have an entry.

Jon Becker: Do we know of those five rounds? It was.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Some of them were yours, one was mine. I think a leg, or I think was a leg, and the rest were miles. And they think his was the one that pierced her heart and killed her.

Jon Becker: Okay, so Kenneth Walker dives back into the bedroom. He fires a total of one shot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it.

Jon Becker: And if I remember correctly, I mean, obviously, one of the inaccuracies in the reporting that has bothered me since I dug into this and read all the files is you hear it described as that he fired a warning shot, which, I mean, shooting you in the thigh is a pretty strenuous warning, but I guess you could qualify it if you really stretched it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. He said he shot at the ground.

Jon Becker: His aim is very bad. Because he hit you very effectively in the thighs.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So he fires the shot and retreats into the bedroom. She's in the hallway, mortally wounded, attempts.

Sgt. John Mattingly: To follow, catches the rounds. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, she probably steps into the rounds as you guys are engaging. Right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: At least the first one, probably. And took her down if it was a leg shot.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So then you have Brett Hankinson goes to the side. He fires ten rounds through two different sets of windows.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It'll be in three total. Two sets of windows and the sliding door.

Jon Becker: Okay, so he starts at the sliding door, is basically putting rounds.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As he's walked, as he's moving down the building.

Jon Becker: Got it. Which is currently the subject of a federal indictment for wanton reckless endangerment. Right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And civil rights violation, which, if convicted, is a life sentence.

Jon Becker: So the wanton reckless endangerment that underlies that, is that he was not presented with a target, but was simply firing through blinded windows.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay. And I mean, I think that, you know, obviously that one's going to play out, you know, in federal court.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And, yeah, the only positive hope that he has, I think, is that it already went through state court. The same. Basically the same charges, but on state level, and he was acquitted. And in Jefferson County, I thought there was no way, because we're a super liberal city.

And the amount of, naturally, the amount of coverage with the protests and everything that happened in the city, Washington, it was. It was nonstop for months and months and months, every day, every newscast. So everybody in the city knew about it. So it's hard to get an impartial jury on that. But thankfully, once they heard the evidence in court, they were within 2 hours acquitted him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's very fortunate. I mean, obviously, this is. And we'll touch on this. This ends up being the biggest case probably in the world for an extended period of time, because it becomes a cause celeb that literally LeBron James. And there's a long litany of people that felt the need to comment on it. And I think that the accuracy. I would encourage our listeners to go look at the official report, look at all the photographs are online.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: The information is literally out there. You can read everything. You can read the statements. The New York Times did a kind of real time reenactment that shows positions. And I think that for a listener to this podcast, it's a good idea to go watch that, because if nothing else, it visualizes it for you. It's not, from what I'm seeing and what we've talked about, totally accurate, but it's close, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: All the facts leading up to and some of wrong, but the actual depictment of where the placement was of the bullets and everything's accurate.

Jon Becker: And so just to go back to the door. So there's, you know, your left side of the door, that a guy to your right side, which is Miles.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. Well, the guy to the right was the ram.

Jon Becker: The ram.

Sgt. John Mattingly: The breacher was Mike.

Jon Becker: Mike.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As soon as he hit, he naturally backed out.

Jon Becker: So he breaches, and then Miles steps up next to you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, he came up over my right shoulder. He was also on the right side. And he kind of, you know, can. How you kind of zipper in.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So as I turned left, he kind of was coming right, and he saw the flash. And Brett happened to be over his shoulder, you know, eager to get up there, trying to get their way in. And he saw the flash too. And when he did, that's when Brett realized, I can't get in the doorway. I knew John was shot, but I can't get in the doorway because Miles is there. So I'm going around the front.

Jon Becker: So he peels off.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So you get hit, turn, run, basically, in between two cars where you fall.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Miles continues to engage, and Brett runs around to the side and engages through the blinds. Then at some point, the shooting stops.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Then what happens?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So while they're working on me, I hear them yelling inside and on the radio and different things. I even remember at one point, Brett getting on the radio, saying, they got a long rifle, and I'm on my back, and they're doing the tourniquet.

And I remember yelling at him, going, no, it wasn't a rifle. It was a. It was a silver handgun. Because my mind. I mean, I just focused on it. There could have been a rifle there too. But I never even made it to Breonna Taylor. You know, once I hit that gun, my. I stopped. Yeah, because everything just happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because, well, he shot you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And so.

Jon Becker: Which has a whiff. Picking. You pay attention.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, it got my attention real quick. So while they're doing all that, Jamar or Kenneth Walker is inside. He doesn't call 911. You see on the news, all this. Oh, man. He called when he heard somebody banging his door. He called 911. And you hear him, somebody shot my girlfriend. All that. He didn't do make that call until six minutes after the shooting. He called his mom first.

Then there was a gap. Then he called 911, and then he called Breonna Taylor's mom. He didn't come out of the apartment for almost 17 minutes, even though he knew the police were out there, just refused to come out for whatever reason, scared, whatever. Whatever you want to label.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At that point, it's probably reasonable for him to be afraid. He just shot a police officer.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. So the only fact that throws all that into maybe a contentious point for those that said he didn't know it was the police and for what he said on that recorded call to 911 is the fact we know he called his mom first. And then we also had a courtesy officer that lived in that apartment that. That went to middle school and high school with Kenneth, knew – Knows Kenneth's mom. And when he heard the shots, he turned his radio on, heard an officer was down, put his uniform on, and came down to the scene.

By the time he got down there, Kenneth Walker's mom had shown up because he had called her. And she came up to this guy she knew naturally, and said, I don't know what's going on. Kenny called me and said, they're at the door. I said, who's at the door, baby? He said, it's the police. I gotta go, and hung up. So we don't know if that call was made prior to the incident or if that was the first call made after. But he was on the phone with her for, like, two and a half minutes.

So we know that wasn't if that was the second call made or the call after the shooting. That wasn't the extent of the conversation. So there was a third phone on scene that we don't have access to. The FBI has, for whatever reason, they won't give us to us. But I. It was on the bed. It was on the side of the bed on the table. And we don't know if that original call when we were banging at the door was made from there or if he told his mom that after the shooting. Not really sure.

Jon Becker: Got it. But he, you know, obviously after the fact, these things have a way of taking on kind of their own explanations. But best case scenario, from. From Kenneth Walker standpoint, he doesn't know it's the police and thinks that somebody is breaking down the door, which could be her ex boyfriend, could be whoever.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. I mean, evidently, a couple months prior to this, him and the ex or the ex boyfriend had come to the apartment asking if he was there. I guess he knew he was seeing him as well, and she was kind of seeing both guys, and so it was kind of a mess in that area. And Kenneth Walker, he wasn't the saint that the news paints him out to be when they downloaded his phone. He's selling pills and weed and holding up all these different guns, which guns by themselves aren't illegal, but if you're selling drugs, you can't have a gun.

Jon Becker: But he's legally. He's legally carrying.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right, right. Even though before legal carry. Even though before open carry was legal in Kentucky, you had to have a CCW to have a gun concealed. He was caught with one. They charged him. It was lowered to some. Some misdemeanor in court. And so that was never. That charge never stuck on his record, even though he had been caught with one illegally prior to this.

Jon Becker: Got it. But he has a CCW. He did at the time. I mean, not that it matters because he's in an apartment and could legally possess a gun in an apartment. Okay. So then they. It's one of the things that is troubling when you watch the video is like, you guys had EMS staged with you, but it doesn't seem like they were with you because you were down on the ground.Sgt. John Mattingly:

Yeah, I'm not a long time. We still don't know what happened there. When I first pulled up to ems, I pulled up, and I looked up, and two very young EmS workers, and I thought, oh, crap, man. My kid. I mean, look, he's young as my kids. And the driver was a black guy. The passenger is a white guy. The driver, when I pulled up, had headphones on, and I honked my horn. They didn't hear me. I got my light out, shined. It finally got their attention. He rode the window down. He couldn't get his headphones off. They were stuck in his braids. The white kid's over there watching something on his phone. Totally zoned out.

And I said, man, you guys here for us? And he said, yeah. And I said, hopefully, we won't be long. You'll be on your way. And I left and went over to Mike nobles and said, man, I hope them guys ain't got to save our life, because I don't know if they know what they're doing. And it's just kind of the odds of it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. One of those ironic moments that seem to always exist in these situations. So at the point that. That they put the tourniquet on you, is the video of that public, like, that was released, the body worn camera.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: That is released, which I think I would encourage people to watch because it. It is certainly. And we'll talk about training and preparation, but it is. It's troubling. The. The level of medical care that you are receiving with a femoral artery. I watched it several times. I'm deeply troubled on your behalf. When the guy that's putting a bandage on you says, I don't know what to do with this. I can only imagine what was going through your brain at that point.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Because, well, the main thing going through my brain was, okay, they got the tourniquet on. I'm good. I care less about a bandage. You know, whatever. It's blood, it's already there. Putting that bandage on ain't going to change much. But my concern was, I thought I'd been either shot twice or the bulletin ricocheted off. Something went up, because the pain wasn't where I was shot. It was up in my groin, in my lower back. So I was like, man, check. Check this out. Because by the time the camera starts, the tourniquet was already on.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we'd been out there for a few minutes, and I remember saying, get a knife cut higher to make sure you got high enough. Yeah, that's what I kept saying. Just make sure you're high enough. You're over the. If there's two wounds, make sure you're above the second one.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And so they cut it, and he said, man, I can't find anything. Well, I guess it was just the nerve endings that had been damaged when the. When it went through, because, again, where the. Where it went in and came out, there wasn't much pain. It was. It was the different area. So it was really weird. But, yeah, even the tourniquet thing, man, if there's cops that are listening to this, again, complacency. And it wasn't on purpose on this one, on my behalf. When I came out from the brief, had two flat tires on my car. The car behind me had a couple flat tires. So somebody come to our parking lot and pop some tires.

Jon Becker: Police cars.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So I went in, found a pool cardinal while I was transferring all my stuff. I mean, it is just pouring rain, so I'm in a hurry. Moving. Moving gear, moving equipment. And when my vest wasn't on, I always took my tourniquet out and threw it in my glove box because I thought, well, if I'm going down the road or whatever reason, at least I can get it quick instead of my vest in the trunk or backseat. Well, when I moved stuff, I totally forgot to get my tourniquet. I was in a hurry and just messed up, so I couldn't save my own life if somebody else didn't have a tourniquet.

Jon Becker: Which fortunately, somebody did.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. Okay, so then they transport you to the hospital, right? You get kind of basic medical. They, you know, what do you end up having to have as far as surgeries go? And what happens then?

Sgt. John Mattingly: What was like I said, a five hour surgery. I went in at 230 or two, woke up at 730 in the morning. I remember, open my eyes and was like, the first thing came to my mind. I don't know why. I looked at the nurse and said, what blood type am I? Because I wouldn't have known what to tell them on that either. You know, we didn't have the patches on us. We didn't have any of that stuff. So she told me.

And then when my wife came in, I didn't know if anybody else had been shot. The bad guys, I knew none of the good guys had been. And I looked her and said, man, was anybody else shot? And she said, yeah. I went, who? And she said, a female. And, man, my heart just sank because I knew the female didn't fire the shot. I know the taller of the two did, and it was probably the male, so. And, you know, it's every cop's worst nightmare. You don't want to. You don't want to put a bullet where it's not, where it doesn't belong. You don't want to shoot an innocent person.

And in this case, she was innocent. You know, as far as she didn't shoot the police. You know, maybe her lifestyle wasn't pure, but that's most people. So she didn't deserve to get shot. She didn't deserve to die. But, you know, the situation was just a total tragic, tragic event.

Jon Becker: I think one of the things that made me want to sit down with you was when I first started to investigate this and started reading all the files and everything else, you know, it's portrayed that, you know, it's seven racist cops, you know, shooting some, shooting an unarmed black female in her home, you know, in her bed. And, you know, these situations are never as bad as they are presented, and they're never as good as they're presented.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: It's always – The truth is always gray.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And as I started to dig into this, there were several things that. That made me want to sit down and talk to you. And one of them was the fact that you've said kind of from the beginning that she didn't have to die and she shouldn't have died. And this is, this is a tragedy.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, I think kind of her whole life was kind of, you know, we get on people saying, quit being a victim. Quit being a victim. But she was kind of a victim her whole life. Dad's been in prison her whole life. Mom didn't raise her. Grandma did. Grandma died. She kind of got reunited with her mom, it seems like, at the end.

But these girls are the typical targets for these guys to take advantage of, to use. They can sniff them out somehow, and they just, these girls are attracted to the bad boys that are going to, quote, take care of them and love them and do all this stuff. And it appears that she was stuck in that kind of, that cycle because that's how she was raised. And so victim on that end and then victim on the end where instead of this boyfriend saying, stay in here and call 911, I think somebody's kicking our door down. No, come out with me in the hall.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You know, and then instead of rendering medical aid or letting the police come in and render medical aid, didn't do it. You know, one of his statements on, I think, good morning America, he was like, oh, as she went down, I held her in my arms and held her as she passed away. He didn't have any blood on him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. That's clearly not true.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And then when he comes out, he blames her for shooting. No, she shot. So, you know, this guy is not a guy of integrity or somebody that we want to believe or hang your hat on yet. That's what's happened here.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it's just unfortunate timing. Right? Like this. This is, I said to several people, like, as I investigated this, certainly there's blame to go around all over the place here. Right. And like, all these things there, there are numerous people that made catastrophically bad decisions that led to this whole thing, and they were seemingly insignificant decisions at the time. Right?

But what I think is worth noting here is, from the beginning of this thing, it took on a life of its own. It was, it went from a news story that Louisville police killed an unarmed black woman in her home to LeBron James is talking about it. And it is the top story in every newscast. And it just began to accelerate and accelerate and accelerate.

And you could see that at some point, the facts weren't going to matter anymore. Like, it was just, you know, you had, you had plaintiff's attorneys show up that were immense, you know, immediately shaking the city down. And then you have all the civil unrest that breaks out. And, and in the process, you know, the facts. I'm not gonna say the facts don't matter, but the facts, you know, I said in the intro, like, the initial reporting is very inaccurate. It becomes more accurate over time.

By the time you get to the New York Times recreation and some of those things, like, you've gotten a pretty accurate. Like, you hear the reports and they're pretty accurate. The problem is that the initial story is what sticks. And the initial story is, you know, seven racist white cops.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, man.

Jon Becker: Shoot a poor, unwarrant black.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah. The big tragedy in this was that, that a lot of the unrest could have been avoided, I think, had the truth just been put out. Because look at the four. Four of the things. There was more, but the four main things initially put out by Kamala Harris, by LeBron James, by Cardi B, like one of Cardi B's post had over 17 million views or likes on it about us that were full lies. They said we had the wrong address, which isn't true. Everything on the warrant had her address on it. Her social, her car, her description. They said she was asleep in bed. She was not asleep in bed. She may have been asleep before we got there, but the incident didn't occur. They made it sound like we walked in and assassinated her.

Jon Becker: That's exactly what I thought when I first.

Sgt. John Mattingly: People still believe that. I get. People hit me up online all the time with crazy stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And how could you sneak into this person's house and kill him in bed? I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, they said we didn't knock. It announced. Well, that's been disproven as well. They said Jamarcus Glover had been in custody for 10 hours, so there was no need for us to even go there because we were looking. It was an arrest warrant for him. Well, neither of those things are true. He wasn't in custody yet, and it wasn't an arrest warrant.

So once all those facts got put out and nobody rebutted them, that had a position of authority, you know, naturally people think, oh, well, the news ain't lying to me, though. Must be true.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. And I think. I think that that kind of transition us, like, I would encourage anybody that listens to this podcast to actually go and look at the report and do the homework. Like, before you make a decision on anything that's happened here, read your book, which I think is, you know, is pretty right down the middle. I actually expected it to be more partisan since it's your book and this. You know, you were one of the victims of this thing, right?

Like, obviously, Breonna Taylor lost her life, and that's terrible. And I'm not gonna minimize that in any way, shape, or form because, you know, as you said, she didn't deserve that. But this thing wrecked everybody's lives. And I think that, you know, if you read your book and you understand how many times you moved your family and how many times your kids were threatened and, you know, all of the things that happened, I think what made me initially want to sit down with you is like, this guy is every narc sergeant I've ever known.

There was nothing in the execution of this search warrant that was any different than you would see anywhere in the United States a narcotics team doing. Right? And so, like, I. The big thing that I want our listeners to take away is the lessons learned here. Right? It is the kind of cautionary tale of this situation.

And I would encourage people to look at the press coverage, look at your book, look at the official reports, and understand the fallout that occurred because this thing took on its own life and managed to just destroy everybody in its path in the process.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. And if I could add, you know, we as police officers, we get pretty calloused. You know, 20 years of people saying they're gonna kill you or fighting you or hating you, spitting on you, whatever, you get kind of used to it. You don't like it, but you're used to people saying ugly, nasty, mean things, but your family isn't.

When you've got, you know, young adults as your kids and one that's still in elementary and then a wife and parents and everybody that's getting all these threats and then having the FBI come to you and say, yes, there's been a hit taken out on you and your family, get out of town.

You know, that kind of rattles everybody's world because even if you're seasoned in it, when that happens, you go, man, this is like a movie. Are you kidding me? Now we've got in the middle of the night, get up and move. You know what's happening here.

And then at the same time, when fortunately, I had a guy in our department, Tom Chardine, who's retired now, but he was over our dignitary protection team, and he fought so hard for us to get a security detail because the department didn't want to do that, knowing there was an active hit placed out on us, knowing the FBI said, it's good we're investigating. They were like, we don't really have the manpower. We don't want to do it.

And fortunately, he fought and, you know, there's still some good people, you know, in command, but. And he was one of them. And so I'll forever be indebted to him for that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because, I mean, the city washes their hands of this thing instantly, as quickly as they possibly can. You have the chief of police and the mayor running from it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I talked to the mayor the day after I got shot. He came in. I talked to the police chief the night of, and then the day after he came and saw me, and I talked to one other person on the command staff after that. And other than that, nobody from the chief's office I've talked to this entire time.

Jon Becker: So you're laying in a hospital bed with a gunshot wound and that was the support you received?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, it wasn't one of those, you know, when you leave, you got the guys lined up cheering out of that. Nah, it was me and my wife and two buddies from work.

Jon Becker: That's horrifying. Let's talk about. So you, you ultimately heal. How long does it take you to get kind of back to normal from the gunshot wound?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Man, I got back fairly quick. I rehabbed hard.

Jon Becker: Leg didn't break right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, no. Fortunately, I had a wallet in my pocket that kind of deflected it because it was right at the femur bone. It was right at the hoe is. And the doctor said, that's good. It still hits your femoral artery, but if the bone had shattered and then hit it, it would have drawn up in your pelvis and, you know, there's nothing you could have done about it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I just recently interviewed Jordan Robison, who was shot in San Bernardino, and that was exactly what happened. His femur shattered and I didn't realize. Your femur is constantly under tension and it slammed it up.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Into, you know, pelvic area. Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So I guess I was fortunate in that area.

Jon Becker: Yes. So ballistic wallet paid off?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. So my legs still numb, but overall things are pretty good. I held fairly quickly, you know, pushed it, pushed it, pushed it. Because I want to go back. I told my wife in the hospital, so I'm going back. I'm going to do a warrant. First thing I'm going to do when I get back, it's like falling off a bike. I'm getting back off.

Yeah. Unfortunately, you know, with the circumstances, that was impossible. They didn't, they didn't want me to come back. So when I rehabbed and came back. And the day I came back, they were like, oh, you're transferred to the property room. And I, you know, as a form of, quote, punishment since they couldn't legally do anything to me.

Jon Becker: Well, and so you guys are all in legal jeopardy initially. Right? Like the DA is going to, the attorney general's looking at it. Potentially everybody's going to have charges filed against him.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Ultimately, it's only Brett Hankerson that gets state charges filed.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right, correct.

Jon Becker: Which is reckless, you know, want endangerment charges.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: But the day the district attorney. Yeah. Doesn't file on ondemand, either of you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Yeah. The attorney general didn't. And people were in an uproar. Uproar over that because they don't understand the system. You know, you only file charges where there's probable cause, you know, where a crime has been committed. And when they looked at the statute, looked at the circumstances, they were like, well, we didn't charge Kenneth Walker, and we're not charging them for self defense. You know, do we have Castle doctrine for him? Do we have self defense for them since they're police officers? So people were mad about that.

But, you know, I am grateful for the attorney general, who's a black man in Kentucky who stood his ground. And, you know, you had Beyonce writing him saying, oh, you got to do this, or we're going to do something about it. You had 50, I think, 56 members of Congress in Senate writing, saying, we need to get locked up and all that. And he stood his ground. And, you know, for a politician to do that, it's rare these days.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure. Well, none of the other politicians in town did, so.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not at all.

Jon Becker: Bonus credit the AG. So then at what point did you realize this thing is spiraling out of control?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. So when it first happened, you know, like I said, I asked my wife, and I'll crap here. A white cop shoots an unarmed black female, this ain't gonna be good.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: But then it was. It was March 13th. And again, I forgot to say this. When we served the warrant, it was a Friday night or Friday morning, early full moon, Friday 13th. And I'm like, oh, man.

Jon Becker: Yeah, here we go.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. All the stars were aligned. So, Covid, the shutdown for the nation was on the 13 march. That's when the president came in and said, you know, we're shutting a lot of things down. The state did as well. So I thought, in the back of my mind, I thought, maybe we'll go without much press coverage on this because they're so consumed with this Covid thing. And that was the case for at least a month. Then Ahmaud Arbery got shot.

Well, Ben Crump went down on the Ahmaud Arbery case. Well, when he did, the attorney for Breonna Taylor's family, a female there, had gone when she went through law school, had done her internship for him. And so she reached out to him and said, hey, our clients not getting any national attention. And this is her words, our clients not getting any national attention. Can you do something for us? Well, he went, what circumstances? Told him, oh, ding, ding, ding, money. Sure I can. No problem.

So his big statement was, if you run for Ahmaud, run for Bree. Cause they were doing some two mile run or whatever it was in his remembrance. And so things started picking up then, because before that, it was her family and a few people, maybe 15, 20 people, you know, a couple times a week, making a fuss, but not a big deal.

Then after a mod happened and it started getting national news because of that, then you could feel the tension in the city start to pick up. Then it went from 20 people to 50 people to 100 people to 200 people. And as time went on, the crowd grew each day for this little protest.

Now, Louisville's always had the reputation of not being. Didn't really have the heart to do big protests. You know, we'd hear, oh, it's coming in three percenters, and these people or whoever come in and be a handful of people. You're like, I was kind of let down. So I was thinking, well, maybe this won't really catch on, because this is Louisville. You know, we're a liberal city, but things. These things just don't happen here.

And when it started building up, though, and more and more people started happening, and then the death threats just started coming in like crazy. I reached out to our president of our city council, who's a retired cop, who trained me in the academy, who trained me how to do these warrants, who taught the narcotics class I went through. I reached out to him and said, man, can you do something about this? Here's what they're saying. And I laid out all the. All the lies, and I said, here's the truths. And I laid all those out.

And I said, the mayor's too big of a coward to say anything. He said, he is. I'll do a press conference next week and get the facts out. Perfect. I got a black city council president who's got some clout in the community, who's a former cop, who's gonna help me out here, right? That's what I thought. So that never came through. Matter of fact, he end up getting on tv a few weeks later talking about, we served a no knock warrant. We did it all wrong. And all this stuff, I'm like, that's not even the case. We did not serve a no knock warrant.

So that fell through and things kept building. And then you had, you know, the pinnacle. George Floyd. So you had this horrible trifecta. Breonna Taylor in March, Maude Aubrey in April, George Floyd in May. And once that happened, the city just exploded.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Then it just, you know, and I think everybody knows the story from there. It takes off. So, like, let's talk about the cautionary tale here. Let's talk about lessons learned. And there are several things that stick out to me, and I just want to kind of walk through with you. Let's start with training, right? So we've got. We have an ad hoc team of seven guys that have never served a warrant as a team together. Your. Your narcotics training, that there's no formal. Like, nobody's been through a SWAT school.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: When was the last time before this event that you had received any kind of entry training? Formal entry training?

Sgt. John Mattingly: 2017.

Jon Becker: So three years.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, almost three years.

Jon Becker: Almost three years. And. And who was that training from?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was from SWAT.

Jon Becker: Is that – Is the culture in the organization that there's a positive relationship between narcotics and SWAT, or is it a tense relationship or. What's that?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I would say it's neutral. It's not tense. It's not, you know, there's no. There's no animosity. We had some SWAT guys in narcotics, and we would call them if we needed something to go, hey, can you reach out and, you know, get this done for us? And they would, but, yeah, there was no tension there. It's just. SWAT's just different. That's the only way I can describe it. You know, they're a different alpha breed than the rest of cops, usually, and so they do their training. They kind of keep things almost to themselves, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's kind of secretive.

And so if they had to train us, they probably didn't want to, but they did. But, you know, and some of that falls on us as leaders. We could have done our own training, and we didn't because we figured, man, if we're doing three or four warrants a week, why do we need to train if we're doing live action training?

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're good. We're doing it all the time.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. I've done 2000 nothing. I mean, I've been shot at, but nobody's died, nobody's gotten hurt. You know, here we go. And ultimately, that complacency or that lack of being proactive in training, you know, put us where we're at today.

Jon Becker: Well, I just. One thing I should have hit early in, but, like, prior to this, you've had in your career no force complaints filed against you, right. You never shot anybody.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: You've never been shot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And if I remember correctly, I think your only sustained discipline was a late report or something.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yep. That was it.

Jon Becker: You got a letter in your personnel file.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it.

Jon Becker: So, you know. There's not. You don't have a long history of. Of negative discipline that, you know, this often in these situations, you know, you look back over the history of somebody and it's like, oh, this guy had 15 force complaints.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Like, how did his bosses not see this guy?

Jon Becker: Yeah, exactly. You, like, you watch. You watch the train wreck develop over the course of ten years. One of the things with this that struck me is how. How that's not the case here.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. No, I mean, and this ain't. This isn't me being cocky, but people wanted me to work for him because I did what they asked. You know, we worked hard, we got results, and. And the guys enjoyed working for me. It seemed like. So there wasn't any issues. Like, I didn't have any tension with upper command. You know, there was none of that. It was just. I came to work, did my job, went home.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Until this day. And then, you know, that's that. So how regularly, while you're in narcotics, does your team train? Just 2017, and then that's kind of it. Do you have a regular training day?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, what they started, I'm trying to think when they started it, and it went on for about six months and it kind of fizzled out. Was once a month they wanted to do some type of training. So I think one month we had the district attorneys come in and talk about how they wanted warrants done. One month we had maybe a vehicle takedown training, but most of it was classroom stuff, not hands on. This is what we're doing. And that wasn't a tack house. It wasn't stuff like that.

Jon Becker: And then there's no formal process for anybody to go through SWAT training or.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, no. Yeah, you can't. If you're not in SWAT, you can't submit and go to SWAT training.

Jon Becker: How often do you guys do you shoot? How often do you qualify?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Twice a year.

Jon Becker: Is that the only time you shoot?

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it, yeah. As a team or as. Yeah. Unless you do it on your own. Are unfortunately our. At least at the time. I don't know if it's changed. Our range wasn't available to us because when they weren't doing recruits or doing regular qualifications, they were written it out to other people.

Jon Becker: So if you wanted to shoot, you had to go to, like, a public range, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. No ammo. Wouldn't give that up because it's too expensive. So it was. It was either you did it on your own or you didn't do it.

Jon Becker: Got it. Did you do it on your own or you didn't do it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not much.

Jon Becker: Got it. So let's talk about equipment. So you've got only handguns, right? Everybody's in soft armor, I'm assuming.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I had plates.

Jon Becker: You had plates. You said guns. Gun lights?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: No optics on your weapons.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not allowed.

Jon Becker: Not allowed. And no long guns.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not allowed either. Used to be able to have a long gun. We used to have one long gun, one shotgun, and then pistols on every entry. And without explanation. They wouldn't tell us why. I think. My personal opinion, I think SWAT didn't want them so they could. This is when they were pushing their full time team so they could say, no, we need to come in and do all the warrants. Not positive on that because nobody would give us an answer. You know, it's kind of like a kid when you tell them no.

Why? Well, because I said, yeah, well, sometimes you need to know the why. And I think this was one. We're risking our life. Give. At least give me the why. Help me understand so I can relate to my guys. But that was never the case.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And so you took a shield with you. Well, you didn't. One of your guys took a shield.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, that was a mistake on my part. As I'm out messing with my car in the lot in the rain, one of the guys who had worked. I've worked with him off and on for years. He was a canine guy most of the time. But now he's doing this, he says, hey, sergeant, I got a shield. Do you want to bring it? I was like, sure.

And then I went on and did my thing. We, none of us that made entry at night have been trained on a shield. I don't know where he got the shield. I don't know if somebody left in his car, if he borrowed it from. So I have no idea. But I said, sure, bring the shield. So then by the time all these other things go on and we get on scene, I'm the first one up. He comes at some point in behind me. I forgot about the shield. Totally forgot about it because in 2000, warrants, I think I've used a shield twice. And that was for, to keep pit bulls back.

So unless you're in SWAT, you don't get trained on the shield either. And so it's, it was a mistake. I would love to have had it and hopefully would hit the shield, not me, but again, not trained on it. So I'm not sure how effective that would have been either.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's a fair point. Let's talk about tactics for a minute. So at this point in time, it's 2019…

Sgt. John Mattingly: 2020.

Jon Becker: So 2020, March 2020, a lot of teams have begun to move to a contain and call out approach, research warrants, at least on the coasts, including ours. So your SWAT team had moved to that approach.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, they implemented that.

Jon Becker: And did they use that on the other warrants that they served?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm not sure. I think some people said they did. Yeah, I know they didn't go through the door.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The video looks like…

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm not sure if they banged the door or knocked the door and banged first sometime they did that. I know. But I don't know if on that one in particular. I think when they pulled up, some people ran in and so they knew the police were there and they called them out. That's what I think happened.

Jon Becker: So the SWAT is using contain and call out, but narcotics is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, not at all.

Jon Becker: So everything you do is dynamic, either….

Sgt. John Mattingly: Dynamic or taking people off at other locations. Welcome back.

Jon Becker: Yeah, taking vehicles down and those kinds of things. Was there any discussion? Did you remember at that point about containing call out?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. It was never even a suggestion to us. It was never, hey, SWAT's doing this, maybe you ought to think about it. Or SWAT never came to us and said, hey, now, I do know. The retired SWAT commander reached out at one point after this event and said, man, I told the chief in 2019 or 18 or whatever it was, it was somewhere close to that. Before he retired, he said, I told the chief that we had to have you all in, do training, get you all up to date on what we're doing. And he said, no, the budget and time don't allow for it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Penny smart. Tele dumb.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So I mean, and at that point it had been two years plus since you guys had trained with the SWAT team. So even if they're doing it, that, that tactic, there's no organizational, institutional knowledge being passed back and forth, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: There's no, there's no sop on it. There's no nothing.

Jon Becker: Is, is there a culture in the organization of debrief and paying attention to mistakes and lessons learned?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT’s great at it. But the narc units, the impact units, no.

Jon Becker: So when you guys did a warrant, did you have like you normally would do a warrant? Was there, you know, sit down kind of after action? Hey, we shouldn't do this. We should think about doing this.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, in the early days, I'm talking years ago, it was brought up, it's mentioned, or maybe they said we should or you need to. But it's never been a practice. If somebody royally screwed up on something, you talked about it. But, but like you said, it's, there's always something. No, no, n op is perfect and we should have been addressing those. And maybe if we've been addressing those all along we would have come to the point. We looked at each other and said maybe we need to do this containment and call out because you, you know, we keep messing up here and there and eventually it's going to catch up to us. And it did well.

Jon Becker: And, but in the 2000 that you did, you know, prior to that you hadn't had that many close calls, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, just one, one shooting that I was going through the door on, that.

Jon Becker: Was it that those around that would pass you past your head if I remember correctly? Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty close call.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was. I got cut up from it.

Jon Becker: But, but other than that you have 2000 repetitions of this working?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Like, yeah, the only thing, only issues we ever had were dogs that we had to put down. Other than that humans usually complied, ran, did something. Yeah, we were just, you know, fortunate.

Jon Becker: Now let's talk about knock and announce. You're banging on the door. Do you have any kind of PA system?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: No loudspeakers? No. You know, nothing that would wake up the neighborhood and make sure everybody's paying attention?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. And I think I talked to you about this earlier mistake, another mistake we made that we had just let fall by the wayside. I can't remember honestly the last time we did it. It used to be common practice that every time we served a warrant because we were in plain clothes. Now obviously our vest said police big on them. We were probably more recognizable than a guy in a dark blue suit with one little badge. You know, it said, police. We had guns. You know, you knew who we were.

But we used to always have a marked car pull up out front, and as we were knocking, they would hit their lights and sirens, minimum lights every once in a while, tooth or siren a couple of times, just to let the neighborhood know also that these bangs are here, these yells, you're here. Don't worry, it's all right. It's the police. But to also inform the people inside. And we had let that slip, and I think it could have made a big difference here.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I think that as I read through the facts of this, obviously, we'll never know what was in Kenneth Walker's mind. Right. And unless we can somehow get access to whatever exchange happened between him and his family, we'll never know whether he believed it was the police before he fired. His behavior, to me, does not look like a guy who was there to shoot it out with the police. Usually if the guy's going to shoot out with the police, he stands at the door and there's a gunfight, he fires one around and runs away.

So in the back of my brain, there is always this kind of. Maybe he legitimately thought it was her ex boyfriend or something like that. Obviously, once he fires the round and gets fired back, he realizes he's engaged the police at a minimum. At that point, he knows whether he knew before that. But the fact that there wasn't a PA system, there wasn't any kind of, you know, there weren't – there wasn't a marked unit out front. Certainly weakened the knock and notice aspect.

And I think one of the lessons learned is, you know, what we see a lot of teams out here do is they will use a really loud loudspeaker. And actually, when they do a containing call out, they will record the audio on the opposite side of the house and demonstrate. Yeah, no, I hear the audio and, you know, again, any of these things, any one of these things may not have changed the situation.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: The question is, if you're looking at this going forward, how many of these things can you, can you do.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: To just decrease likelihood.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Or at the very least that way, if it gets out any negative way, all the lies you can go. No, man. Here's, here's, like you said, here's a recording of them saying police. You know, we didn't have any of that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And in this case, there were. There was. The guy upstairs knew the police were there and said that he heard the knocking notice.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: There's one other that, like, I think if I remember correctly, one other that said they did and then kind of recounted that as time went on.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. So the guy downstairs, I think his last name is nagby or nether be something like that. The one that when. When Hankinson shot it went through. Through Breonna Taylor's apartment and into the apartment where this other couple lived. And what he told the first investigator on scene that took statements was, I heard you all knocking at the door and yelling, I thought you were there for me. As I was coming to the door. That's when the shots started ringing out, and that's when it came through my wall and we just dove on the ground.

So he knew. He heard us yelling. I'm not sure if he could verify police because he wouldn't go that far because, you know, a week later they sued us. And then he totally shut down.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Cause Hankison's rounds, just to put this story, if you picture the apartment running down sideways, there's another apartment that's basically right behind that one.

Sgt. John Mattingly: The kitchen wall. The kitchen wall connects them.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Common kitchen wall. Hankison's rounds go through the kitchen, through Breonna Taylor's kitchen, into the neighboring kitchen.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And through their sliding glass door.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So if you look at the pictures online, you'll see that the shattered sliding glass door, you'll see pictures of rounds in clocks and chairs and all kinds of stuff. So, yeah, you can see where he would not necessarily be all that friendly after taking rounds in his apartment. But there were no other people that came forward and said that they heard that it was the police.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, matter of fact, their main witness, she's a protester, got on. She's been on a couple of the different documentaries saying, oh, I didn't hear the police. Not, they didn't knock it, they didn't announce, they didn't do all this stuff. And she's the one that their attorney propped up as their. Their prime witness.

And I've got a recording of her on her Facebook where she was live on there talking. And she said, all you people mad at me? She said, I couldn't even heard the police if I wanted to. I was two buildings away. And I'm thinking, yet she was the prime witness, you know, saying that we didn't announce. So that's what you're dealing with.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure. So then from a obviously medical response is. Is troubling. I mean, fortunately, you know, they saved your life. We're thankful for that. But there was, EMS was staged at a point that they. What does it take them ten minutes to get there?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It should have taken. It took him about ten. It should take him like less than a minute.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So they're playing video games quarter mile away. Yeah, playing video games, watching TV.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And then your teammates. And I'm using air quotes when I say the word teammates, your coworkers. Nice. Are not obviously trained. One of them is trained in how to put a tourniquet on. But when you see the video, you can see that the guys, they don't even know what to do with the compression bandage. Was there a policy in the agency of teaching any kind of TCCC?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we had CPR and first aid training every two years. And it's – I don't want to say it's a joke, but it's not taken real serious. You come to class, you do your 8 hours, you go home, and if you're paying attention, you're kind of paying attention. If you're not, you're not, which is on you. If you're not, because it's your life at stake. But that's just the reality of it. You know, tape gets played or video gets started. The instructor walks out of the room. You watch the first date thing. They come back in. You practice on somebody once or twice, you're done. It's kind of. It's pretty lame.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And obviously was necessary.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You know, unfortunately didn't have a worse outcome for you, but that was not for lack of trying. What about in the agency? Talk to me about the role of the narcotics units versus the SWAT team. It's full time SWAT team. And then you have more than one narcotics unit, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, we had. Let's see, you have your major case unit. You've got your interdiction unit. And then at one point, we had three street squads. I think at this time we only had two. And then you had the place based investigation unit, which really wasn't narcotics, but it fell under the guise of how they had reorganized some things. So basically four narcotics units.

Jon Becker: But narco, from a chain of command standpoint, is on a completely different chain of command from SWAT.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: And there's not a regular engagement taking place for culture swap or like, hey, we're doing this and try this. Got it. One more topic for gear. Talk to me about body worn cameras because it was a very controversial subject. What was the agency's policy at this point on bodyborne cameras?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So if you were in the narcotics unit, and you didn't work off duty, you didn't have to have them. That was mainly for protection of some of the detectives that may have worked semi undercover stuff or plain clothes.

But mainly it was for informant reasons, because the cameras are open records, and to get a civilian to be able to retract them correctly or, you know, block out certain parts, it was. It hadn't been fine tuned, and they didn't want defense attorneys getting a hold of these cameras and diamond out the other informants that were rattin their clients out.

A couple of the guys had them. The. The guy on the highway, he had it, didn't have it on. And then a couple guys that worked off duty had it, but they weren't. Again, they weren't required to have him on at this time. So they may have had him, but they weren't required to be operating them.

Jon Becker: At this time retrospectively.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, wish we'd had it. I would. I would do anything to have that footage.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's funny because you and I talked about this, and, like, when body worn cameras first came out, I was not a fan. Not me. I'm like, you know, this is just going to be used to put cops in jail and, you know, everybody's going to Monday morning quarterback the event and all that. You know, over the last ten years, as they become more in vogue, you quickly realize in situations like this that it's never as bad as the plaintiff's attorney makes it out to be.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And no matter what the video is, it's. It's better.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Yeah, no, I wish. You know, if there's departments out there, they're on the fence, man. Go for it, because I think. I think there's some stat out there. This is like 90% of the complaints that come in when guys are wearing body worn cameras are debunked because you know the truths right here on your shoulder. You can't change the footage. And people just lie or in there, in their tense situations dealing with the police, maybe they construed a death, something totally different, kind of like, you know, the different statements of that night that people saw through their lens, different things than what actually happened.

Jon Becker: One, even the guys involved in the event, I mean, you guys all had kind of slightly different.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. However your body reacts physiologically, you know, is going to be different than the guy next to you.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. You may have audio auditory exclusion, you may have visual exclusion. You may. You know, it certainly have tunnel vision.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because, you know, it's terrifying. Let's. For a last topic, let's talk about the agency's response publicly. So there's a lot of kind of debate about transparency in law enforcement. And, you know, I've had several friends that are chiefs that have implemented very aggressive release policies where the body worn camera is released almost immediately.

Mostly big agencies, LAPD, La Sheriff have gone to that, where it's like, here's what happened. Here's the body wearing camera. Here's all the data we have. It seemed to me that the approach taken by Louisville PD was to circle the wagons and hide. There was not a lot of public comment. There was very little disclosure of information initially.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Even to. Even to Breonna Taylor's family. They were frustrated because they could not get any answers either. And I understand that. I'd have been ticked off if I were them, too, because they kept requesting the same stuff and maybe had. Had they been given the information or they could have diffused some of this because still they'd have been mad. You know, they'd have been sad, they've been tragic, all that stuff.

But at the same time, maybe that. That deep anger that was put out and the emotions that kicked in with everybody and I believe a lot of the people were. Thought they were doing the right thing, you know, as far as. As pushing back against the police, because again, at this point, nothing had been debunked. And. And just a couple months in the defense attorney or the defense civil attorney had deposed the mayor and instead of him going under oath and tell him what happened, we are. We were all deposed man. They grilled us for days.

But then when it was his turn, they turn around, settle the case. You know, two days after they said they were going to depose him and settles it for $12 million. Did not get the approval of city council. Anything over a million was supposed to get their approval. Did it on a Sunday night when nobody knew what was going on.

So I can see from the outside looking in that we look guilty. You know, city gives them $12 million, they never say no. It was the right house. They never said no. She wasn't in her bed. They never say no. He was already. He wasn't in custody. All these things. They never said any of this stuff. Instead, they let these rumors fly. Things were leaked from inside the department on one of the guys from a. A sexual abuse complaint from twelve, 10, 12 years earlier that was found. He was cleared on and it was supposed to been destroyed and those after those records, after two or three years and somebody leaked it to the press.

And so that put mud on the case as well. That was never come out by the department. Go, oh ho ho. That he was cleared on that. There was nothing there. So all these little things kind of just, they just kept compounding and building up to the point where anybody from the outside looking in, even other police officers, even people in our own department didn't know the truth. And months later, and, you know, they're out there facing all these protesters and stuff, not knowing what they're fighting for.

And so that was very frustrating and made you want to beat your head on a wall because you knew the truth, you knew they had the truth. And for whatever reason we talked earlier that, you know, they distanced themselves because they don't want to take responsibility for it. If they can pawn it off on somebody down on a lower level, why not? And I think that's what took place here because the mayor had already had her on his platform saying, we need justice for Breonna Taylor and if I could fire the police, I would, but they're protected under law and, you know, all these things.

So he had already dug his heels in the sand on what side he was going to be on and just was not going to put the truth out. And our chief at the time, and probably now I'm sure it's hadn't changed. He didn't run the department. Everything went through the mayor's office. Every string that was pulled was by the deputy mayor. And just a yes man period.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And at some point, you know, it's like we were talking about earlier, at some point it is easier for the politicians to burn everybody in the incident.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You're just a number. No matter, no matter what kind of work you've done over your career, no matter, no negativity, all that. It doesn't matter if you're a liability to them at this point, whether it's legit liability or just this made up, you know, thing that happened, they'll just cut you loose, they'll let you hang out to drive.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So if you were and you are now teaching, you know, fortunately you went out, wrote a book, put your own story out there because it wasn't going to get out otherwise. But when you are interacting with young narcotics units and young cops, what, what is your counsel to them as to how not to end up?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Man, it's a lot of things, like for years and this was just kind of common practice and we talke dearlier about what common practice will get you, right? You know, if things you get in this rut and things don't change, we don't develop, we don't, we don't continue to learn and make, evolve, then we're going to be in trouble. And that's kind of what happened here. We stuck to all the old plans of here. You walk in, I know nothing about the case, here's this warrant, go serve it.

So instead of sitting here and me going, hold on, pump the brakes, give me some background on this, give me some more information on, let me dig into it myself a little bit. Didn't take place. And if you're putting your name on it, and maybe not on the warrant, but our names on the, on the catch sheet for, you know, for everything else after that warrant sign, then maybe you want to put a little bit of your own blood, sweat and tears into it beforehand and not after the fact, because it's much easier to divert and avoid stuff than it is to try to fix it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I mean, it's challenging because the, you know, you're working with people, you have to trust them. But in this case, I mean, we have federal charges filed against the three officers that got the warrant.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And part of the federal charges are that they falsified their affidavit.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And it was so unnecessary too, because the wording in the warrant said that the postal inspector said that he, Jamarcus Clover, was getting packages in his name. They didn't need that. They've got him on video going in empty handed, coming out with those boxes, going straight to the trap house. All they had to do was take a little bit of extra time and explain how this works in the narcotics world.

And it's the same probable cause, if not even stronger, because who's to say he's not getting shoes through the mail there? Yeah, you know, we don't know. And they don't know what he got to that day, but at least that puts him in a category of, this is the typical way narcotics dealers do things, and this is what he did. That with all the other information would have been, would have been strong enough.

And I don't know if lack of experience, because again, you had these guys who, one guy in that whole unit had done warrants, the rest of them had been jump out people in a different platoon that, when they, when they created this unit, pulled them over. And now you've got them doing a three month investigation with five warrants and pole cams and trackers, man, they're probably barely keeping their head above water, to be honest. I mean, this is all new to them, and you're throwing this on them.

And then at the same time, you've got the mayor's office coming in every week with three of the people from the chief's office getting updates on this case. There's a little pressure to get something done. So then you've got these younger detectives going. Well, let's make this warrant sound really good, because what's it going to matter, right? Who's going to know or what's going to hurt?

Well, it's one of those things that, you know, when the veils uncovered and you got this lie, it makes everything look bad. And, and between, between that and the shots coming in from outside and the. And the statements from the, the ten year old sexual assault, all those things put together, they spun it in a way that made us look like the most corrupt copse, you know, in America.

Jon Becker: Well, and you're falling into a time, you know, between Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, where we're looking for that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. White people are the devil. Hunting down black people.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And cops. Right. Like, it's. It's. We. We obviously, at that point, defund police is a thing, and we are right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: In the middle of an election cycle.

Jon Becker: Yeah, absolutely.

Sgt. John Mattingly: There's zero politician on either side that's gonna stand up for you.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You know, I reached out to both of my senators, both Republicans. Both of them were like, nope, sorry, good luck. You're on your own.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At some point, you're so toxic that they can't touch. It's just, it isn't worth the political risk to them. Is there anything else you think that. That guys listening. I mean, obviously, we talked about training. We talked about kind of prep. Is there anything else that you think that guys need?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, just complacency. It's so easy, man. When you. When you do this repeatedly. And this is anything in life, I don't care what it is, you get just somewhat complacent. And you've got to be your own barometer and self check. Or your buddies, you know, we talk about checking on your buddies for mental health, and if you see them drinking or you see them going astray, whatever, check them. It's no different here.

And that's why probably debriefs are so important because that does kind of refocus you every time you do an op instead of coming in and. All right, good. Let's go have dinner. You know, and then we move on to the next one and then we may repeat the same mistake over and over and over. It never gets corrected. But then when things do go right 2000 times, you don't expect them to go wrong on this easy one and they just do. Because you do let your guard down some. You can't. It's human nature.

Jon Becker: When in the end there is no easy one.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's true. Just like there's no. There's no routine call.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. In the same way there's no routine call. There is no easy one. I think, you know, I'm so appreciative. You came and sat down with me and I think, you know, I wrote an article a while back on a police shooting and I said, you know, just because a tragedy occurs doesn't mean an injustice does.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And in this case, certainly Breonna Taylor deserved better than she got. And we'll see what the federal court system has to say about, you know, the warrant and what took place afterwards. But I was talking to somebody recently about this and I said, the great irony of the Breonna Taylor case is that the two guys that shot Breonna Taylor were the only ones that were acting constitutionally right. And to me that is the tragedy of this is in the end, you're an arc sergeant doing your job and you got run over by a national train. And I'm sorry for that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I appreciate it! Real quick. One of the other things that I tell these guys when I talk is you've got to be your own voice. You got to fight for yourself harder than anybody else because nobody's going to fight for you like you will because so many times here on the street, what are we willing to do? You hear the gunfire, you run toward it. You're willing to fight people for your partner, you're willing to take a bullet for a stranger. But then when you're off the job and they come at you like they did us, what do most cops do? They just cower down. They don't know what to do, you know, they just, they just go into turtle mode and, and you just take that beating.

And at some point and, and preferably early on, even if you've got the gag order on you like we did, there's ways to get stuff out. You got to be creative and think outside the box and get it out there because the city's not going to do it for you. Your department may not do it for you. Some will, some won't. Your upper chain of command probably really won't because they got to worry about their own jobs.

So you've got to figure out ways to fight for yourself and get. Get the truth out. And it's not easy, and people will. Riddick. I've taken so much ridicule and hate, and. And people have told me, look, man, just. Just disappear. Just go away. I'm like, no, it's not about me anymore. My stuff's done. You know, Kenneth Walker's not getting charged. I'm not getting any money. This, you know, I've had to move. I've lost money. I've downgraded everything. Whatever, I'm over that. That's in the past. But now there's all these cops coming after me.

That, like you said, could be me next week. It doesn't matter if you're patrol, if you're SWAT, if you're narcotics. We're all making runs that could potentially, in a brief second, flip into something that could be national news, and you're not prepared for it. I don't care how much you think you're prepared for it. You're just not. And so, you know, get out there and just fight for yourself.

Jon Becker: Love that! I think that's a great place for us to stop. John, thank you so much for doing this, buddy, man!

Sgt. John Mattingly: Thanks, Jon! Appreciate it!