Ex-Louisville jail guard goes from vigilante action to shoplifting charges

Yasmany Leyva knew a few things about shoplifting.

As a Louisville Metro Department of Corrections officer who worked off-duty retail security, he arrested at least 20 people between 2018-21 for the offense. Most of the arrests came at a South End Kroger, where he’d sometimes end up chasing suspects on foot and bringing them to the ground after they walked out of the supermarket without paying for merchandise.

But now, Leyva is on the other side of the equation.

On Sept. 25, he was charged with misdemeanor- and felony-level shoplifting offenses, with Louisville Metro Police accusing him of stealing thousands of dollars in merchandise from area Lowe’s Home Improvement stores, according to court records. If convicted of the felony charge, he faces between one and five years in prison.

But when Leyva is arraigned later this month, it will not be the former jail guard’s first brush with the law.

The 36-year-old was fired from Metro Corrections last year over a 2020 plot in which authorities say he pulled a gun on a man in the parking garage of the Caesars Southern Indiana casino before handcuffing him and transporting him to Louisville during a sting he set up to recover his stolen Mercedes-Benz.

That incident, which occurred when he was off the clock in civilian clothes, would lead to Leyva's arrest a year later, after Indiana authorities filed a charge of kidnapping with a deadly weapon against him. He was taken into custody while entering the country at Miami International Airport.

The criminal prosecution of that case failed when the key witness stopped cooperating, but Metro Corrections eventually terminated him after an administrative investigation.

Contacted by phone, Leyva declined to comment on the incidents, except to point out the charges in Indiana were dismissed. The attorney who represented Leyva in his Indiana case was not available for comment.

Leyva is one of more than a dozen Metro Corrections employees who were terminated or resigned in lieu of termination since the start of 2022, after being investigated for misconduct. Those terminations came amid what a jail expert hired by the city called a “disturbing” tolerance of misconduct at Metro Corrections, which has seen 15 in-custody deaths since late 2021.

But unlike many of those other cases, Leyva’s misconduct occurred away from the troubled downtown jail, as he allegedly engaged in extrajudicial, vigilante action instead of turning to fellow sworn law enforcement officers.

This story is based off of court records and documents obtained under open records laws:

A stolen car in J-town

On July 25, 2020, the owner of a used car dealership in the Louisville suburb of Jeffersontown called police to report a Mercedes-Benz stolen from his lot.

The vehicle belonged to Leyva, who was trying to sell it.

Surveillance footage that later surfaced showed a masked man going into a room at the dealership and grabbing Leyva’s keys after returning from test-driving a Porsche.

Three days after the theft, an acquaintance of Leyva’s reached out to him, saying someone had come by his Preston Highway car dealership the night before trying to sell a vehicle that matched Leyva’s.

Together, Leyva and his acquaintance set up a plan to meet the man later that day, and ultimately agreed to purchase the vehicle from him for $10,000, according to Leyva.

The man later presented himself to investigators as a fixer with street smarts who helps car dealerships find stolen vehicles and avoid going through costly insurance claims.

“I’ve got my ear to the street basically,” he explained to Louisville police investigators. “If there’s a car that’s gone missing on these car lots…they’ll say ‘hey, man, we’re missing a car.' You know? 'Keep your eye open for it.' I’ll go around and tell people there’s a reward for it. They ain’t going to be paying no reward. They’re going to get their car back. You know what I mean?”

Leyva said he told Jeffersontown Police about the meeting, but did not want to wait on them and also feared the fixer would flee if he saw a police presence.

“Either you all come with me or I’m going to do it my own way,” Leyva recalled saying while speaking to investigators later. “I’m like — if I show up with PD, he’s going to run. So I set it up myself.”

The acquaintance and the fixer agreed to meet at a New Albany, Indiana, gas station. From there, Leyva and the acquaintance followed the fixer’s car eight miles to the garage of Caesars Southern Indiana casino, where the missing Mercedes-Benz was waiting.

The fixer parked and had a bad feeling. Then he opened his door.

“I didn’t even make it out of my car … before he was drawing on me,” he told investigators.

As Leyva aimed his gun at him, the fixer said, the corrections officer shouted “LMPD, freeze, get your hands up. Get your hands up. I’m going to shoot you.”

Conflicting stories at South End gas station

After pulling a gun on the man, Leyva handcuffed him and told him to get into the Mercedes before driving him to Louisville.

“He kept threatening me saying ‘look, man. You’ve got to tell me who’s involved in this or I’m going to kill you’ or ‘tell me or I’m going to hurt your mom and dad’ and all this other s---,” the fixer told investigators.

In an affidavit, a Harrison County Police Department officer wrote that the fixer said Leyva had his gun out while driving back to Louisville.

They ended up at a South End gas station. At some point, Leyva called dispatch, requesting Louisville police to meet them.

According to a LMDC’s review of body camera footage, Leyva consistently gave responding officers the impression he met the fixer in Louisville and arrested him there.

“My girl brought me over. She had to go back to Corrections and work,” Leyva told a Louisville Metro Police officer, pointing to a gas station when mentioning being dropped off. “Obviously, I got him at gunpoint, 'cause I didn’t know if he got anything on him. I got him out, cuffed him up. Told her you good. Go on. That’s when I called 911.”

The fixer, meanwhile, spoke up and told police he was taken in Indiana.

Later, an LMPD officer confronted Leyva after seeing him arrive in the same vehicle as the fixer in surveillance footage. Leyva then said they had met nearby and gone on a test drive before he arrested him. Asked where he detained him, Leyva pointed down Taylor Boulevard, saying “I cuffed him up over there,” according to LMDC’s review of body camera footage.

With conflicting stories, LMPD did not file charges against the fixer.

The fixer later insinuated he knew who stole the car, but maintained he had nothing to do with it.

“I never drove the car, never was in the car,” he told investigators. “I was only in the passenger seat at gunpoint from him.”

The Courier Journal filed an open records request for body camera footage of the incident in August, but Louisville Metro Government said the request would take up to six months to process.

An arrest at Miami’s airport

At about 2:15 a.m. on Aug. 3, 2021 — just over a year after the incident at the casino parking garage — Leyva was arrested in the customs area of Miami International Airport as he returned to the United States from a vacation in Mexico.

Harrison County prosecutors had built a case against Leyva, ultimately charging him with kidnapping while armed with a deadly weapon, a Level 3 felony in Indiana punishable by a sentence of between three and 16 years.

Less than a week after the arrest, Leyva was placed on administrative suspension without pay by then-LMDC Director Dwayne Clark. In a statement to The Courier Journal, Capt. Jason Logsdon, an LMDC spokesperson, said Leyva was on suspension until his ultimate termination in November 2022 and had his peace officer powers suspended during that time as well. Despite the suspension, Louisville Metro Government's publicly available employee database showed he received salary in 2022.

A jury trial was set for July 2022, but in May, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the case.

“The case was ultimately dismissed because the alleged victim would not show up for depositions and was not cooperating with the prosecution in this case,” Harrison County Prosecutor Otto Schalk wrote in an email to The Courier Journal. “To that extent, without the victim’s cooperation, a dismissal was the only viable resolution on this case.”

LMPD’s Public Integrity Unit, which investigates potential criminal activity by local law enforcement and other Metro Government employees, then picked up the case.

LMPD reached out to the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office about potential charges, but in a June 2022 email, the office said while Leyva could have faced misdemeanor-level unlawful imprisonment charge, the one-year statute of limitations had passed.

Fired from Louisville's jail

After the criminal case stalled, LMDC’s Professional Standards Unit, which investigates breaches of department policy, opened a probe into Leyva’s actions.

Interviewed by investigators, Leyva’s story changed, and he claimed he told responding LMPD officers from the start that he’d arrested the fixer in Indiana.

“I told them [LMPD] exactly what I just told you,” he said. “They said ‘good job, man. You caught your thief. You did some good work.’”

He also denied he told LMPD his girlfriend had dropped him off at the South End gas station or that he had met with the fixer to go on a test drive in Louisville.

Leyva had similarly told LMPD investigators in 2020 that he told officers on the scene he had picked up the fixer in Indiana — even when an investigator told him they had body camera footage to the contrary.

LMDC concluded Leyva willfully lied to police.

“Officer Leyva fabricated the story of how he intercepted [the man] in an attempt to mask the criminal act of abducting [him] in Indiana and bringing him back to Louisville, Kentucky before contacting police,” an LMDC investigator wrote. “Officer Leyva was aware he does not have arrest powers in Indiana. Officer Leyva attempted to use his sworn peace officer status in Kentucky to his advantage in hopes LMPD would believe his version of events, without question, over [the man].”

Leyva was found to have violated multiple LMDC policies in the incident. He was terminated in November 2022 after being employed by Metro Corrections for over seven years.

Speaking to investigators, Leyva said his mistake was not calling police from the casino.

“As soon as I put him in cuffs, I should have called Indiana PD right there, which I made a mistake,” he said.

A Facebook post and a tip

Last month, LMPD turned to Facebook to help find suspects they accused of stealing “hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of” merchandise from Louisville area Lowe’s stores in recent months.

Police on Sept. 22 shared several photos of suspects, including one in a red T-shirt and another of a pickup truck with temporary plates.

“The guy in the red shirt is Yasmany Leyva,” commented one woman, who identified herself on social media as a Metro Corrections officer and former partner of Leyva’s, within hours of the post. “The Silverado belongs to him.”

Days later, LMPD posted an update to say Leyva had been identified as the result of tips. They added he had come into court with an attorney in response to outstanding warrants.

He is set to be arraigned on Oct. 25 across the street from Louisville’s jail.

Reach reporter Josh Wood at jwood@courier-journal.com or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @JWoodJourno

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Vigilantism to shoplifting: Ex-Louisville jail guard facing charges