The former Louisville, Kentucky policeman who shot and killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020 has been hired as a deputy by the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office. Carroll County is approximately fifty miles northeast of Louisville.

The hiring of Myles Cosgrove, who was determined by ballistics to have fired the fatal shot that killed Taylor during a midnight raid of the young woman’s apartment, was confirmed on Saturday by Carroll County Chief Deputy Rob Miller.

Speaking with the Louisville Courier Journal, Miller said Cosgrove passed the county’s background check and added, “We think he will help reduce the flow of drugs in our area and reduce property crimes. We felt like he was a good candidate to help us in our county.”

Carroll County Sheriff Ryan Gosser told CNN that Cosgrove began working for the county on April 20. Both Miller and Gosser referred to the fact that Cosgrove was never charged criminally by the state or federal government for killing Taylor.

Cosgrove was terminated by the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) in January 2021 for use of deadly force by firing 16 rounds into Taylor’s apartment in the dark and for failing to activate his body camera. In December 2021, the LMPD Merit Board upheld the decision to fire Cosgrove after several days of hearings in response to an appeal by the former officer.

The Kentucky Law Enforcement Council’s vote last November against the revocation of the former Louisville cop’s state peace officer license made it possible for Cosgrove to be rehired. The state law enforcement council is made up of mayors, county judges, police chiefs, sheriffs and police union officers from across Kentucky. 

Cosgrove was one of three white LMPD officers who fired their weapons on the night of March 13, 2020, into African-American Breonna Taylor’s apartment while they were executing a “no-knock” search warrant as part of a narcotics investigation.

Cosgrove and officers Jonathan Mattingly and Brett Hankison rammed the door down into Taylor’s apartment while she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were sleeping. Walker, who was a licensed gun owner, fired a warning shot, believing that their home was being invaded. The officers returned a barrage of up to 32 bullets, shooting Taylor multiple times and killing her.

In both state and federal investigations, only Hankison was charged with a crime in connection with wantonly shooting his weapon into the apartment and endangering the lives of family members in the adjacent unit in the building. Hankison was found not guilty of wanton endangerment in the state trial in March of this year. None of the officers were indicted or charged directly for Taylor’s death.

The protection of the officers, especially Cosgrove, by both Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and the US Department of Justice is part of a convoluted narrative that the officers should be exonerated because they were sent to serve the warrant on false pretenses.

This justification for murder was articulated plainly by US Attorney General Merrick Garland who said the federal grand jury did not indict them because “the officers who ultimately carried out the search at Taylor’s apartment were not involved in the drafting of the warrant and were unaware of the false and misleading statements that it contained.”

Instead of the entire LMPD being investigated for the deadly use of force, the state and the federal government shifted attention to Kelly Goodlett, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, the three officers responsible for the warrant application. On August 22, 2022, the US Department of Justice brought charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and civil rights violations against them for conspiring to mislead the judge who approved the search warrant on Taylor’s apartment.

However, evidence of criminality by the officers was exposed three months after the shooting when the LMPD revealed that they falsified the incident report from that evening, entirely omitting the fact that they killed the young woman by shooting her eight times, stating that there was no forced entry into the apartment and leaving the four-page report largely blank.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Walker was quickly arrested and charged with first degree assault and attempted murder for firing his weapon, which allegedly struck Mattingly in the leg. Eventually, the charges against Walker were dismissed with prejudice. Walker has also denied that he fired the shot that injured Mattingly, with his attorney stating that the bullet was recovered at the scene with no blood on it.

This officers’ actions, which are standard in police violence cover-up operations, were a deliberate effort to sweep the murder of Breonna Taylor under the rug and rely upon the dutiful participation of the corporate media to make sure that the public never found out about it.

It was the determined protests of her family and friends demanding justice for Taylor—along with the mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin that swept across the US and internationally in the late spring of 2020—that made it impossible for the authorities to continue the cover-up.

This week also brought news that former Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter, who fatally shot Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center on April 11, 2021 during a traffic stop, was released from jail at 4:00 a.m. on Monday. Potter served just 16 months in prison.

Potter, who is white, was convicted on two counts of manslaughter in the killing of the 20-year-old Wright, who was black. Potter claimed that she mistook her gun for a Taser when she shot Wright. She will be on supervised release for the remaining third of her two-year sentence.