KY activist who shot at Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg will spend years in federal prison
A racial justice activist who shot at Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg during his 2022 campaign has been sentenced to 17 years and 6 months in prison.
Quintez Brown, 24, pleaded guilty last July “to interfering with a federally protected activity and using and discharging a firearm in relation with a crime of violence,” federal prosecutors and law enforcement said in a news release announcing the sentence Friday.
Greenberg said in a victim impact statement that he supported the plea agreement and urged “a sentence at the high end of the range.”
He said the incident has left him “a changed person” and that his family members “also live with fear and questions.”
“I’ve tried to move forward with strength and resolve ... yet still concerned, still looking over my shoulder,” he wrote.
Greenberg was in a meeting with four members of his campaign staff on Feb. 14, 2022, when officials say Brown came in and fired shots at him.
Greenberg said in the statement posted on Facebook Friday that he and his colleagues were talking “when I saw a person I did not recognize facing me in the doorway.”
He said one of the staffers “tried to engage him in conversation, but before there was any response, I saw a gun pointed directly at me, and I’ll never forget the sound of those gun shots fired.
“Somehow, Kevin thought to slam the door shut when there was a momentary pause in the shooting and several of my colleagues threw the furniture and themselves up against the door to barricade us inside.
“I don’t know how I miraculously survived,” Greenberg wrote in the statement, which he said he shared at the sentencing. “Six gun shots fired directly at me from close range by a person I did not recognize. A person who, I later learned, was in front of my house the night before and only left because his gun jammed. A person who tried to figure out where my son’s play was being held the weekend before the shooting. A person who had a picture of me on his cell phone home screen. A person who purchased a new gun an hour before he tried to kill me.”
After the shooting, Brown was arrested several blocks away, according to the news release, with the gun used in the shooting inside a backpack.
“As part of his guilty plea, Brown admitted that he acted because Greenberg was running for mayor,” the release stated.
Brown will spend five years on supervised release after he gets out of prison.
Before the shooting, Brown had announced plans to run for Louisville Metro Council and was known around Louisville as a writer and advocate for racial justice.
This story was originally published January 24, 2025 at 7:57 PM.
