Nighttime warrant ended with police killing Kentucky man. Should they be served that late?
Equipped with a search warrant and a fresh lead in a stolen property case, London police forced open the door to a man’s home just before midnight last month in a rural part of Laurel County.
But officers didn’t get to execute the Dec. 23 search warrant. The situation escalated to gunfire first.
Police said the 63-year-old resident of the home — who has not been publicly identified as a suspect in the theft investigation — pointed a gun at them, prompting an officer to fire several rounds from his patrol rifle. The man died at the scene.
Policing experts interviewed by the Herald-Leader questioned the decision to carry out a search warrant for a suspected property crime investigation at that late hour, just a little more than a day before Christmas. Doing so increased the risk to officers and the public alike, they said.
“There’s not a piece of property in the world that couldn’t be recovered the next day,” Mark Wohlander, a former FBI agent and assistant federal prosecutor, said. “This case is a prime example of why Kentucky needs to change things with how they do search warrants.”
But some longtime police officers disagreed. They noted in interviews that state law allowed officers to serve the warrant at that hour, and nighttime helps officers remain concealed until they want to reveal themselves.
Questions and controversy have plagued the London Police Department since the officer shot and killed Douglas Harless at his home in Lily, an unincorporated community about 90 miles south of Lexington.
Some have been answered, at least in part:
Were officers at the right house? According to property tax systems, they were.
How did police end up killing Harless? The numbers on the front of the home did not match the house numbers in property tax records used by police.
But the lingering — and less straightforward — question was: Should police have tried to serve the warrant that late?
Harless’ death is not the first time late-night search warrants have been scrutinized in Kentucky.
Following the fatal 2020 Louisville Metro Police shooting of Breonna Taylor in her apartment during a search warrant execution gone wrong, Kentucky’s Republican attorney general convened a task force with the goal of making the process safer.
One of the proposed changes would have required warrants be served between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.; the group instead recommended timing be one of several factors weighed by police.
Pete Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied police raids, proposed a number of changes in rules on serving warrants to state lawmakers after Taylor’s death, including a ban on search warrants after 7 p.m. except in “extreme life-threatening situations.”
The legislature did not adopt that change.
“Police had no reason to assume that delaying the search until daytime would result in lost evidence or heightened danger,” Kraska said of the December shooting. “In this case, the outcome was predictable. Harless reacted defensively — raising a firearm — and was met with lethal force: five shots from an officer’s rifle.”
What happened in the Harless case?
London police had received a report about a theft in the city and developed information about a suspect named Hobert Buttery, 49.
Buttery admitted taking a weed eater and a heater from a home in London, and police charged him with theft, according to a citation.
Buttery said he had taken the weed eater to a house in Lily. Within hours, police obtained a warrant from a judge to conduct a search at a residence on Vanzant Road, according to the court record.
According to a warrant obtained by a state police detective after the police shooting, London officers attempted to serve the search warrant at 11:48 p.m. on Dec. 23 “pursuant to an investigation of stolen lawn/garden equipment,” knocking on the door of the doublewide mobile home Harless rented and announcing their presence.
One issue in the case is that the addresses in the county property-tax system — which police reportedly used to locate which house to search — don’t match street addresses in the neighborhood.
The address at Harless’ house on the county property-tax map is 489 Vanzant, but the numbers on the house list it as 511 Vanzant. There is a mobile home near where the shooting happened that is marked with a street address of 489 Vanzant, but it is listed as 525 Vanzant on the property-tax map.
Video from a neighbor’s security camera showed four officers went on Harless’ porch. The front of the house was brightly lit by vehicle headlights.
London police told Kentucky State Police that Harless acknowledged their presence at his door but refused to open it.
After police knocked some more but received no response, they decided to break through the door. When they did, Harless allegedly raised a pistol toward them and a London officer fired several shots from a rifle, killing Harless.
The police department has not publicly named the officer who fired the shots.
One thing that has upset some area residents is a perception that Harless was killed in an investigation over a weed eater.
However, London Mayor Randall Weddle, who is doing an internal review of the incident, said his understanding is that the warrant “was based on a variety of items, including drugs.”
London officials have said the city police don’t have a copy of the original warrant in their possession and state police have not released it, but the Herald-Leader obtained what appears to be part of it from a source.
It lists the items to be seized, if police found them during the search, as including, but not being limited to, power tools, leaf blowers, weed eaters, pole saws, tools, electronics, hand tools, vehicle parts/accessories, jewelry and any illegal substance.
One consideration police have in serving warrants is whether there is a need to keep someone from destroying evidence, such as by flushing drugs down a toilet.
Asked if state police found any stolen property at Harless’ house, spokeswoman Sherry Bray said that to protect the integrity of investigations, it is the policy of the agency not to release specific details “until vital witnesses have been interviewed and pertinent facts have been gathered.”
‘People tend to react defensively’
Kraska, the EKU professor, said serving warrants at night can bring increased risks to everyone involved.
“The reasoning here is simple but often ignored: people tend to react defensively to unexpected intrusions late at night,” Kraska said. “It manufactures really dangerous situations.”
Alex Payne has been in law enforcement for more than 40 years and previously oversaw training for Kentucky State Police and local officers as commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training.
Now a chief sheriff’s deputy in Bullitt County, Payne has experience as an officer in Jeffersontown and with state police, including being a member of its original special response team.
He agreed that he didn’t see a compelling reason to serve the warrant at Harless’ house late at night.
“I’m not gonna put anyone at risk over a property crime,” Payne told the Herald-Leader.
Payne said the choice about whether to serve a warrant depends partly on the potential threat to officers and others.
If it would be safer to serve a warrant at night, that would be the choice, he said.
“Nighttime law enforcement operations are conducted to hide our presence and use the darkness as concealment to hide our movement to advantageous positions and enable us to choose the time and conditions to reveal ourselves,” Payne said.
That is usually done in cases that are considered high risk because of known or potential safety threats that are gathered prior to serving the warrant, Payne said.
Harless had no criminal record.
Payne said based on what he was told about the case, it didn’t appear that there was an imminent threat to justify going to Harless’ house at midnight.
“What is the threat to the public here?” he said.
Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, said the facts of every case differ, so the decision on the best time to serve a warrant can vary based on those facts and circumstances.
The organization does not have a policy that lays out when warrants should be served, he said.
Training organizations recommend that police do a thorough analysis of the potential risks of serving a search warrant, taking into account factors such as whether the target of the investigation has a violent record, if there are likely to be guns in the house and whether there will be other people there.
The London Police Department has a policy in place on obtaining and serving search warrants.
It says an officer designated as the search supervisor has responsibilities that include reviewing the warrant for accuracy; identifying any hazards; figuring out the type and number of officers needed for the search; assigning each one a role; and positively identifying the location to be searched.
“The Search Supervisor will make every effort to ensure that the correct premises and only the correct premises are being entered,” the policy says.
The policy does not require serving warrants at a certain time of day.
Police said the goal of analyzing the risks of serving a warrant is to reduce the risk to other people there, the subject of the investigation and the public, police said.
Part of that analysis is considering when it would be best to serve a search warrant, Eells said
“Sometimes it’s really early in the morning, sometimes it’s really late at night,” he said.
Eells said there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to serve a search warrant at midnight.
“Not knowing the specific details of the search warrant, it may well be that they had very good reasoning applied in attempting to go get this at night,” Eells said, meaning the evidence London police were seeking.
NTOA also teaches police not to assume that serving a warrant between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. creates a safer situation, Eells said, pointing to the deaths of two FBI agents shot and killed in Florida in February 2021 while attempting to serve a warrant early in the morning in a case involving crimes against children.
Changes after Breonna Taylor shooting
Under Kentucky law, police can serve a regular search warrant at any time of the day or night.
But if the warrant allows police to enter someone’s house or business without notice — commonly called a “no-knock” warrant — they can execute the warrant only between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. under a state law passed in 2021 in the aftermath of the Taylor shooting.
That law includes an exception if there are urgent circumstances and a judge determines that serving the warrant outside that time limit is justified because of danger to police, people in the place to be searched or the public.
Officers were not let into the home in Laurel County, but they knocked and announced themselves before entering, so it was not a no-knock entry.
In the Taylor case, Louisville Metro Police Department officers broke down the door of Taylor’s apartment about 12:40 a.m. to serve a search warrant related to a narcotics investigation. Her boyfriend, thinking intruders were breaking in, fired one shot at them, striking a police sergeant.
Three officers fired back, killing Taylor.
Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky attorney general at the time who led the state investigation into the shooting, set up a task force to study potential changes to the search warrant process.
The changes proposed by the state Department of Public Advocacy, which represents indigent people charged with crimes, included higher standards for reviewing any warrant to search a private residence and a requirement to only serve warrants between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
Ultimately, the task force did not recommend a ban on serving warrants after 10 p.m., but rather that police should consider, along with other factors, the most appropriate time to serve a warrant
Other sources also favor serving search warrants between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
For instance, federal rules of criminal procedure call for search warrants to be served during that 16-hour period unless a judge specifically authorizes serving it at another time.
Wohlander, the former FBI agent, said he could recall only one case in his career — a major drug dealer in Southern Kentucky who was potentially dangerous — that involved serving a warrant outside the window mentioned in the federal rule.
“Why can’t you wait until tomorrow morning?” he said.
This story was originally published January 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
