Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly’s 12 Seconds in the Dark—published by Daily Wire Books after publisher backlash—details the Breonna Taylor raid, where police targeted Jamarcus Glover’s suspected drug trafficking (heroin, fentanyl, meth) linked to 100K+ overdose deaths. Mattingly, a 21-year DEA/FBI-collaborating veteran, insists officers announced entry for nearly a minute before Walker fired first; Taylor was struck by stray bullets as she moved toward the bedroom. The no-knock warrant was later invalidated due to Glover’s absence. He rejects systemic racism claims, arguing crime concentration—not race—drives policing challenges, and criticizes figures like Biden and Oprah for spreading misinformation that undermines officer recruitment, framing the debate as one of cultural factors over inherent bias. [Automatically generated summary]
So many of you, I'm sure, remember the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky during when police were executing a warrant.
She was shot.
There followed protest, the usual protests and riots.
Sergeant Jonathan Manningly was there and he has written a book about it called 12 Seconds in the Dark, a police officer's first-hand account of the Breonna Taylor raid.
It is meant to correct the media misinformation.
It's published by Daily Wire books.
Here is a brief trailer for it.
It was very chaotic.
It was very quick.
Instantly, I knew I was shot.
Breonna Taylor.
She was caught in the crossfire of those bullets.
As soon as your brain's registering, it's already over.
The media got so many things wrong in this case, saying we had the wrong apartment.
Her name wasn't on the warrant.
She was shot and killed in her sleep in her bed.
These are lies.
This is not true.
And all the while you're hearing all these outside influences from athletes and Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, all those people coming and attacking you, putting your name on their account, saying he should be in prison.
All these things that they have no idea what they're talking about.
But they have such influence.
The more we attack police for doing their job, the less good qualified police you're going to have.
When you read 12 Seconds in the Dark, you will find out the truth of what really happened the night of the Breonna Taylor raid.
There is just no question that police are being alienated.
Crime is going up.
John Mattingly, thank you for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you guys for having me.
I appreciate being here.
So this book, before we get to the actual meat of the story, this book was actually supposed to be published somewhere else, wasn't it?
Yeah, Post Hill Press out of Nashville was going to post it originally.
And when word leaked that the was coming out, they started getting just totally just attacked and threatened.
And their employees were doxxed and threatened.
Simon and Schuster got pelted with all these crazies.
And so they're so woke, they were like, we're not touching the book.
Disregard.
Door to Door Searches00:12:48
We're going to cancel it.
And that's when Daily Wire stepped in and said, hey, we're not scared.
We'll take it.
So we were like, heck yeah, let's do this thing.
Let's go.
That's great.
I'd like to hear that story.
So leading up to this incident, what was your career before this?
What were you doing in the police?
Well, I started out like any other officer on Late Watch for five years.
Then I went to a Flex Platoon, which is a small division-wide narcotics unit.
From there, I got promoted in 2009, went back to Late Watch for a year, then went to a detective's office as a sergeant for about a year and a half.
And then I went to what was called our violent crime unit, Viper.
And we went after murders, robbers, the worst of the worst in the city.
From there, I went back to our major narcotics unit.
And in 2020, I was over, I had gone, just left our major case unit, which worked with the DEA and FBI and ATF.
And I had gone to our parcel interdiction unit because I was planning on only being around three or four more years.
And I wanted my career to kind of slow down so I could, you know, get used to normal civilian life again somewhat before I retire because there's so many guys that are going 100 miles an hour and then they just retire and they're like, oh, what do I do now?
And I didn't want to be one of those guys.
I wanted to kind of slow down because I've been, I'd served over 2,000 search warrants at this time where I've gone through doors.
And so, you know, in my mind, I'm thinking everything in life's kind of a numbers game.
So I might be running out of that luck.
So I'm going to back off of this and go to something a little easier and deal with boxes because they don't shoot at you.
They don't fight you.
They don't do all that.
But little did I know that volunteering to help this one night, these individuals, would just totally change the course of my life.
But, you know, God's been good and we've found the positives out of this and taken it.
And we've been able to help a lot of people so far.
And hopefully this is just the beginning.
Hopefully, we'll be able to use our experience, both myself and my wife, because our family was deeply affected by this.
And hopefully, we'll be able to take that and just continue to bless other people with it.
Well, can you, what was this raid about before you actually got there to the scene?
How did you get involved in it?
And what were the police investigating?
Well, like two or three weeks outside, the unit that was investigating this, we were all encapsulated inside the same unit, which was our criminal investigations division.
I was in narcotics.
They were in a unit that went after just areas that had constant complaints or problems.
It was a program we had just started.
The department just started based out of a program from Cincinnati.
It was place-based investigations.
They were going after just individual targets, very precision-like.
So they've been working on this for about two and a half months.
They were going to serve five warrants that night, which when you do that, it entails a large amount of bodies.
So it's manpower-intensive.
And so they needed other units.
So they reached out.
I was already working that day and working up until about the time of the brief that was scheduled.
So I said, hey, I'll help.
It doesn't matter.
I'm already out.
I'll pitch in and help.
And so this group was selling heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamines, a little bit of weed, but the main thing was their hardcore drugs.
And we had had a ton of deaths, just like nationwide.
In 2020, there were over 100,000 overdose deaths from these exact type drugs, especially the fentanyl-based products.
So we were out there to help them try to clean up some of the streets of Louisville by getting this organization put out of business.
And unfortunately, Breonna had been dating one of the guys off and on for several years that was one of the main or the main players in this organization.
Now, do I think Breonna Taylor was ever physically taking narcotics, handing them to people and receiving money?
No.
But I do believe, and we do know that she was holding money for these groups, for these individuals.
She was using her place of residence.
We don't know what was in those packages, but there were packages delivered there that Jamarcus Glover would show up.
They've got pictures of him going in with nothing, coming out with packages and going straight to the trap house, which is the house that they sold.
It was a couple of vacant properties on Elliott Avenue that they would take their narcotics and sell it all day long to these junkies and spread havoc on the neighborhood.
And then they would leave.
They would go back to their home and sleep.
And so Brianna was tied into it in a way.
I don't know if she was being used.
I don't know if she voluntarily did it.
I know her family background and makeup was one of chaos and not very healthy.
So I think she was just kind of falling into those same footsteps.
So when you use the phrase a trap house, that's the place where the business is going on.
Nobody's living there.
That's an actual drug den, essentially.
Correct.
Yeah.
It's just a rundown piece of property that they can come in and basically squat at.
Now, I think one of the guys may have been renting it, but properties in that area rent for $400 or $500 a month.
And when you've got a cash business like they had, you know, that's nothing to them.
But yeah, it's a place that people come and they had raided these particular houses a couple of times prior to this and every time gotten a large amount of narcotics, several weapons, illegal weapons that these guys that are all felons weren't supposed to have.
Jamarcus Glover had actually just been locked up at that address in January of 2020 for guns and narcotics.
And Breonna Taylor bailed him out and used her address as his address.
So there was a bunch of tie-ins.
You know, people ask, well, why did y'all go to Breonna Taylor's house?
Well, she was part of the organization.
You know, she may not have been out there slinging the dope, but she was still part of the organization.
There's always behind the scenes people, and she just happened to be one of them.
So were you raiding the trap house or were you raiding her apartment?
Well, all of them.
There were five warrants that night.
Got it.
were three of them served simultaneously, the two on Elliott and the one on Springfield, which was Brianna's location.
And so while SWAT was hitting the ones on Elliott, we were in charge of the one on Springfield because it was supposed to be originally it was signed as a no-knock, but once they realized they had a tracker on Jamarcus Glover's vehicle, they had a ping on his phone.
They were getting eyes on him as they located where he was through those devices.
And they realized he wasn't going to be at Springfield.
He was going to be down on Elliott.
So therefore, it took the elements of a no-knock.
They were no longer valid.
We could still have done it because it was signed by a judge, but ethically, it wasn't the right thing to do.
So we didn't do it.
We went back to the normal knock and announce.
And we were actually asked, hey, since we think she's there by herself, give her extra time to come to the door.
Because typically it's about 10 seconds.
You're banging, announcing police search warrant before you have to physically force the door open.
We gave her about a minute and we didn't have any luck.
And that's when we were forced to enter because SWAT simultaneously was hitting Elliott.
And the problem, people say, well, why didn't you wait till the morning to go there?
If she was by herself, if she wasn't a quote, physical threat, why didn't you wait?
And the answer is pretty simple if you understand the game because the word of mouth, the ghetto net, now with the internet, everything travels so fast that while we're hitting Elliot, she's going to be getting phone calls on Springfield saying, hey, they're hitting your boy's house.
It just happens every single time.
And so therefore, evidence would have been moved.
Evidence would have been destroyed.
So that's just, that's the way these operations work.
Well, that's already a very different description than the description I remember reading at the time, which was essentially you served a no-knock warrant on this apartment where people were just sitting around eating popcorn and watching Netflix.
Describe the raid.
What did you experience that night?
Well, when we went up to the door, you know, the whole night, by the time we went to do the raid, it was Friday the 13th.
It was raining.
It was a full moon.
I had ran across these young EMS drivers that were there in case anything went wrong.
And my kids were older than them.
And I'm looking at them going, and I actually told one of the guys on scene, I said, I hope these guys aren't the guys saving our lives if something goes bad.
Well, there they were.
But so we pull up to the door.
We go up.
There's seven of us in this stack, which usually, even on these type apartments, there's 10 to 12, but we were just, you know, we were drained manpower-wise.
So we acted with what we had.
Seven of us were at the door.
Two of us were on the left side of the door.
The rest were on the right side of the door because we were in a breezeway, which was very small, had a metal staircase going up to the right of the door.
So you couldn't fit a lot of people in there safely because tactically you cannot stand in front of a door because there's been so many instances where people just shoot through the door while somebody's banging on the door.
So I'm standing to the side.
I'm banging.
I'm yelling police search warrant super loud.
At that point, an upstairs neighbor comes out because he hears us yelling and like, what are y'all doing?
They're addressing him saying, go back in the house because they don't know if he's a threat or not.
We don't know who knows each other in this apartment complex.
So they're giving him commands to go back into his residence.
He finally cooperates, goes inside.
We keep banging.
We keep yelling.
At one point, the guy that Mike Nobles, who's doing the Ram says, wait a minute, I think I heard somebody moving around inside.
So we stopped.
We listened.
I didn't hear anything.
I yelled again.
Police search warrant.
Come to the door.
We got a warrant.
Please come to the door.
I mean, this is over and over.
And this isn't just talking.
This is yelling.
You could, if you're inside a house, you can hear us.
And that's what got them out of bed.
It gave them time to get dressed, him to retrieve a gun.
As we knocked the door open, I remember being able to see the right side of the living room before I stepped into the doorway.
I was able to clear it visually to make sure there were no threats to my right.
So as I stepped into the doorway to look down the hall or to the left in the kitchen, as soon as I stepped there, I saw two figures at the end of the hall basically overlapping one another.
They were together.
One head was taller, one head was shorter.
So my mind automatically went male, female.
But everything happened in milliseconds.
I mean, by the time I turned, I was able to visually see them.
My eyes went straight to the gun that Kenneth Walker had pushed out.
Boom, he shot.
It was over.
I returned fire four rounds so he would get out of the way, quit shooting, whatever, just to eliminate the threat.
And at that time, he dove into the room because this was a very narrow hallway.
You know, everybody, the things that were put out just were so skewed.
And had I not been there and had I not known the truth facts, I may have thought differently as well because our department and our city never rebutted any of the lies or any of the any of the false statements that were put out.
So for a year, all these false narratives that she was asleep in her bed, that we had the wrong apartment, that Jamarcus Glover, the other boyfriend, was in custody, all these things were inaccurate, but we couldn't say anything.
So when he shot and I returned fire, he dove out of the way and left her right there where he was standing.
So unfortunately, she tried to follow him into the bedroom and receive the rounds that were coming downrange.
And, you know, it was tragic.
It was sad that it happened.
Nobody wanted it to end that way.
We thought, I mean, you never want to let your guard down, but you're thinking, I'm going to a female's house who has no criminal history.
Doesn't mean they've never committed crimes, but doesn't really have a criminal history.
So this should be fairly easy is what you're thinking.
So when that all took place, you know, your mind just goes quickly.
And 12 Seconds in the Dark, the name of the book, was where we got this.
From the time that door was pushed open to all the chaos that happened, all the bullets that flew, the time I had to get out of the crossfire and into the parking lot until it became eerily silent was about 12 seconds.
So it was a dramatic scene.
I have to say, I mean, this is one of the things, if you have, as I do, a kind of morbid sense of humor, it is funny when you hear guys like Joe Biden say, well, why can't the police just shoot to wound like the Lone Ranger used to do on the old 1950s television show?
I mean, you're talking about this kind of chaos and darkness.
So basically, police were returning fire when she was killed.
Right.
Yeah.
We didn't initiate it.
We were just protecting ourselves.
Yeah.
So, and you were, you were then shot yourself, right?
Yeah.
And you talked, you know, you had a perfect segue into it.
You talk about just shoot them in the leg.
Well, I was shot in the leg and it ripped through my femoral artery and I almost bled out on scene.
Had they not, you know, the first thing I did was grab my leg and I was like, oh, this isn't a regular leg wound because I've seen those.
You know, I've seen hundreds of those and they bleed a little bit, but, you know, typically people can even hobble around on them.
No big deal.
Well, this one, not only did it rip through the muscle, but then it deflected and ripped through my femoral artery.
And so when I put my hand down there, I had a handful of blood and I thought, oh, this isn't normal.
So instantly I was yelling for the guys as I'm hobbling out before I fell to the ground was like, get a tourniquet.
I need a tourniquet.
Blood And Training00:02:35
Because so I eliminated the threat at the door.
And then my next step through, this is all through training because you can't, you know, naturally just do this stuff.
So you eliminate the threat.
And then I'm thinking, okay, now I've got to survive.
I've got to get a tourniquet on.
Then once the tourniquet got on, I was like thinking, all right, now get me to a hospital because I don't want to lose this leg.
So all these things are taking place.
And, you know, you hear different stories about people and the way they react and physiologically.
And different people that night on scene reacted totally different.
Some guys shut down.
Some guys went into action.
Some guy, you know, everything just, everybody's built differently.
But I was very blessed that God kept me a clear mind that night and I was able to explain what I needed.
I was still giving commands while I'm on my back to people to do stuff.
And that wasn't me.
That was just God and training that kicked in.
And so I've been very blessed through all this.
You know, the attacks on you, I mean, there's stuff that I was reading to prepare for this conversation from the New York Times and other venues, basically saying this was an ill-prepared, no-knock warrant.
Nobody said anything.
Nobody, you know, suddenly you just swarmed in on people who were really, and Breonna Taylor was completely kind of separated from any of this.
Now, you looked at this and you said, this is not George Floyd.
This is not some of these other events that have happened.
When you see these other events, do you feel that there's any justice in what the people are saying, that black people specifically are under fire from the police in an unfair way?
Or do you feel that that's simply a matter of where the crime is?
Well, that's a matter of where the crime is.
I did this for 21 years.
My daughter's married to a black guy, and I've asked them before and since, you know, is America really as racist as everybody's saying?
Because I didn't see it on the street.
I really didn't.
And my daughter and son-in-law are like, we've never been attacked for being in public as a mixed couple.
And so I'm going, you know, this isn't 1960.
When I hear this stuff, like string and I went back and forth because he's like, he's been pulled over one time, one time for speeding.
And he's like, well, I wasn't speeding.
It was just because I was a black guy in a nice car.
And I said, well, Michael, do you ever speed?
No, I never speed.
I went, well, then you're lying because we all speed.
I speed.
Everybody speeds at some point.
No, I don't.
And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not going to win this battle.
So then he's like, well, black people just feel like this happens.
I went, okay, well, we all feel stuff.
It doesn't make it factual.
It doesn't make it the truth.
Just because you've been, you know, we all have biases.
I won't dismiss that.
Good People Bias00:01:34
We all do.
However, we were raised.
Fortunately, I was raised in a very poor end of town that had black, white.
Our church was very diverse.
So I was fortunate enough to see all these different aspects of life.
And I think it made me a better police officer because I was able to understand different cultures.
And that's what this all boils down to.
With crime, you've got a cultural issue.
You just really do.
And white people aren't allowed to say that, I know, but I'm going to say it.
So because I lived it for 21 years, I saw it firsthand.
And, you know, you could go to different ends of towns and the successful black people we dealt with, they just thought different.
They didn't have the victim mentality.
They didn't have the woe is me.
And but let me say this, in the hood, you've got a lot of good people who just don't know how to get out.
And they went out.
And I would say 80% of the people in those areas are good people.
They're just trapped and they're getting pushed around by the 20%, kind of like the country's being right now.
Yep, yep.
John Mattingly is the author of 12 Seconds in the Dark, a police officer's first-hand account of the Breonna Taylor raid, published by Daily Wire Books when other people copped out and wouldn't do it.
I really appreciate your coming on.
I only got a chance to read the first couple of chapters of the book.
It's really well done and very excitingly told.
And it's amazing to compare it to the accounts at the time and even the accounts that are still up on Wikipedia, which are not at all like what you're saying, which is just very obviously an accurate account.