On April 9, 2020, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department suffered a tragic loss when Officer Breann Rochelle Leath, a 24-year-old Black woman and dedicated public servant, was killed in the line of duty. Officer Leath, who had served with the department for nearly three years and was a veteran of the Indiana National Guard, responded to a domestic disturbance call at an apartment complex on Edinburge Square shortly before 3:00 p.m.
She was accompanied by three other officers as they approached the residence to investigate reports of a violent altercation.
Upon their arrival, the officers made their way to the apartment door to make contact with the occupants. Before they could fully engage or enter, a suspect inside the apartment fired shots through the closed structure. Officer Leath was struck in the head by the gunfire and was critically wounded in the hallway. Despite the immediate efforts of her fellow officers to retrieve her and the subsequent transport to Eskenazi Hospital, she succumbed to her injuries shortly after the shooting. The incident also left a female resident of the apartment injured, though she survived the attack.
The suspect, identified as Elliahs Dorsey, was apprehended at the scene. Investigations revealed that Dorsey had fired the weapon blindly through the door as officers announced their presence. He was subsequently arrested and charged with murder for the death of Officer Leath, as well as attempted murder for the shooting of his girlfriend, Aisha Brown, and the shots fired at the other responding officers. During the legal proceedings, Dorsey’s defense team argued that he was suffering from severe mental illness at the time of the shooting, claiming he believed he was under attack by assassins.
In February 2024, a jury returned a verdict of guilty but mentally ill. However, instead of the murder charge sought by prosecutors, Dorsey was convicted of the lesser offense of reckless homicide regarding Officer Leath’s death. He was also found guilty but mentally ill on charges of attempted murder for shooting his girlfriend and criminal recklessness for endangering the other officers. The verdict meant that while the jury acknowledged his mental state, he was still held criminally liable for his actions.
During the initial sentencing in April 2024, the court imposed a sentence that many in the law enforcement community found lenient regarding the officer's death. Dorsey received credit for time served for the reckless homicide conviction, meaning he faced no additional prison time specifically for killing Officer Leath. However, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and 15 years of probation for the attempted murder of his girlfriend, resulting in a total aggregate sentence of 40 years. In October 2025, following an appellate court ruling that found an error in how a criminal confinement charge had been downgraded, Dorsey faced re-sentencing. Although prosecutors requested an additional 16 years be added to his term, the judge ordered the new sentence to run concurrently with his existing term, leaving his release date unchanged.
