LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Breonna Taylor had just done four overnight shifts at the hospital where she worked as an emergency room technician. To let off some steam, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, planned a date night: dinner at a steakhouse, followed by a movie in bed.
Usually, they headed to his apartment, where he lived alone and she had left a toothbrush and a flat iron. But that night, they went to the small unit she shared with her younger sister, who was away on a trip. It was dark when the couple pulled into the parking lot, then closed the door to Apartment 4 behind them.
This was the year of big plans for the 26-year-old: Her home was brimming with the Post-it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals. She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with Mr. Walker. They had already chosen a name.
She fell asleep next to him just after midnight on March 13, the movie still playing. “The last thing she said was, ‘Turn off the TV,’” he said in an interview. (Callimachi 1).
They'd gotten back about 9 p.m., after eating at Texas Roadhouse and giving a friend's kids rides across town. It was Taylor's first night off after a few consecutive days with 12-hour shifts as an ER technician, Walker told investigators in a recorded interview hours after the shooting.
She fell asleep as the movie was still playing, and Walker wasn't far behind, he told police in that interview.
"Literally, the night was over. If nobody knocked, we would've been asleep within 10 to 15 minutes," he said.
Meanwhile, about 10 p.m., [Sgt. Jonathan] Mattingly and other officers were being briefed on the plan to execute a search warrant on Taylor's apartment as part of a larger narcotics investigation, Mattingly said in an interview after the shooting.
He said they were told that Taylor wasn't believed to have children or animals, "but they weren't sure."
Taylor "should be there alone, because they knew where their target was," Mattingly told investigators. Mattingly said he was unsure why the warrant was requested as a no-knock but he was then told to knock and announce at Taylor's door.
A man named Jamarcus Glover, who was also named on the search warrant for Taylor's apartment, was arrested the same night, 10 miles away at a house on Elliott Avenue in the Russell neighborhood.
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[Joshua] Jaynes, a member of a different unit in Mattingly's division, had requested the warrant for Taylor's apartment and done much of the surveillance and investigation himself, according to the affidavit.
Another officer was responsible for watching Taylor's apartment earlier that night, Mattingly said.
At 12:40 a.m., police officers were in place outside of Taylor's apartment. Mattingly said he began to bang on the front door.
Inside, Walker said he and Taylor were in her bedroom when they heard the knocking.
They called out, asking who it was, but got no response, Walker said. He said later he thought it might have been Taylor's former boyfriend [Glover].
He didn't suspect it could have been police, according to his interview hours later.
Outside, Mattingly heard no response and banged on the door again, later telling investigators: "At that point we start announcing ourselves 'Police! Please come to the door. Police! We have a search warrant.'"
Mattingly estimated he banged on the door "six or seven different time periods," which "seems like an eternity when you're up at a doorway."
The knocking lasted 45 seconds to a minute, he estimated, before police decided to use a battering ram to force their way into Taylor's apartment.
An officer hit the door with the ram three times before it opened, Mattingly said.
Inside, Walker grabbed his gun, "scared to death," as both pulled on clothes and went to answer the door. They left the bedroom and hadn't made it down the hallway before the door "comes off its hinges," he said.
Walker told police he fired one shot as a warning, aimed at the ground, still unable to see and unclear on who was at the door.
"But you can't see anybody, though, when the door comes off its hinges," Walker told investigators. "It happened fast, like an explosion. Boom, one shot. Then all of the sudden, there's a whole lot of shots. We both drop to the ground. But I just hear her (Breonna Taylor) screaming."
Mattingly told investigators that while he was in the doorway, he saw a man and a woman in the hallway. Then, there was a shot.
"And as I turned the doorway, he's in a stretched-out position with his hands, with a gun," Mattingly said. "And as soon as I clear, he fires. Boom."
Mattingly felt a pain in his leg. He fired four times.
He went around the door and fired two more rounds (Duvall and Costello 4).
A little after 12:35 a.m., the officers lined up in the breezeway. Sergeant Mattingly was closest to the apartment door. Detective Myles Cosgrove was next to him, and farther back were Detective Brett Hankison, Lt. Shawn Hoover and others.
Apartment 4 sits in a complex of two-bedroom units covered in beige vinyl siding. Ms. Taylor’s 950-square-foot apartment was on the ground level, and a floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass door gave way to her patio, which faced the parking lot. Blinds covered the door and the window.
“When we all got up in line, I knocked on the door,” Sergeant Mattingly told investigators. “Our intent was to give her plenty of time to come to the door because we said she was probably there alone,” he said. “Banged. No response. Banged on it again. No response. At that point we started announcing ourself, ‘Police, please come to the door!’”
On the other side of the locked door was a 25- to 30-foot hallway, cutting through the living room, passing her sister’s empty bedroom and ending at the door to Ms. Taylor’s bedroom.
The loud banging jarred her awake. “It scared her to death,” Mr. Walker said in his statement to the investigators. “First thing she said was, ‘Who is it?’ No response,” he recounted. “Another knock at the door. She’s like, ‘Who is it?’ Loud at the top of her lungs. No response.”
They jumped out of bed and rushed to get dressed. In the confusion, Mr. Walker put on his girlfriend’s pants.
...
Among the officers outside her door were men who had been trained by David James, the city council president. During his 19-year career as a police officer, he had instructed recruits at the local training academy about “dynamic entry.” Especially when executing a warrant at night, he said, he told them to yell “police” at the top of their lungs, specifically so that occupants would not mistake them for an intruder.
“So everyone can hear,” he added. “Neighbors. People down the street.”
By nearly all accounts, that did not happen at Apartment 4.
Almost a dozen neighbors interviewed for this article said that they never heard the police calling out, including Clifford Tudor, who had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Only one person, a truck driver coming off his shift, said he heard the officers shouting. Aaron Julue Sarpee had left his 2-year-old in the care of the woman living directly above Ms. Taylor. Before the police lined up, he had run upstairs and picked up his sleeping toddler. He had just stepped out onto the exterior staircase when he saw the officers.
Before they ordered him to go back inside, Mr. Sarpee said, he heard at least three loud bangs as they knocked on Ms. Taylor’s door, and heard one or more officers scream “Police!” — a single time. He is emphatic that they said it only once.
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“As soon as the shot hit, I could feel the heat in my leg,” Sergeant Mattingly recounted in his statement. “And so I just returned fire,” he said, adding that he shot at least four rounds immediately, and another two soon after. Behind him, Detective Cosgrove also returned fire into the hallway, according to police statements.
The bullet tore through the sergeant’s thigh, piercing the femoral artery. He scooted out onto the breezeway, then stumbled into the parking lot, where he collapsed, he recalled.
Meanwhile, a barrage of bullets ripped into the apartment from another direction. Detective Hankison had left the formation near the door, run into the parking lot and begun firing through the covered patio door and window, according to police records.
Unlike the two officers standing in the doorway, the 44-year-old detective probably has no self-defense claim, several local officials said. The bullets he shot from the parking lot tore diagonally through Ms. Taylor’s apartment and into Apartment 3 directly behind it, where a pregnant woman and a 5-year-old were sleeping.
His behavior was reckless, the department concluded, because he shot 10 rounds blindly, and it was not directed against someone who posed an immediate threat. He was fired in June. “I find your conduct to be a shock to the conscience,” the interim police chief said in a termination letter.
In nearly two decades with the department, Detective Hankison had received multiple complaints of excessive use of force as well as sexual misconduct, according to portions of his personnel file obtained by The Times. Most of the complaints appear to have been dismissed or not considered credible.
One record showed he was reprimanded at least three times: for improperly charging a man with having a concealed weapon in 2005; for trying to extract crack cocaine from a suspect’s mouth and failing to call an ambulance; and for causing a car wreck in 2016 that fractured the spine of another officer.
… Sergeant Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove have been placed on administrative leave, according to a department spokeswoman, Jessie Halladay.
Mr. Walker was charged with attempted murder for shooting Sergeant Mattingly; the charges were later dropped.
Because no ambulance had been staged, the police spent the next critical minutes trying to get medical help for the injured officer.
“I kept going, ‘Where’s E.M.S.?’” said Sergeant Mattingly.
Radio logs paint a scene of chaos. An ambulance rushing to the apartment complex went to the wrong entrance, blocked by a locked gate. On the radio, officers yelled instructions to ram the vehicle through the gate. But the ambulance didn’t get past the crushed metal. Colleagues tried to put Sergeant Mattingly in the back seat of a squad car, but he couldn’t bend his leg. They tried to put him in the trunk, but it was blocked by a gun case. Finally, they laid him atop the trunk.
As officers outside scrambled to help him, no aid was rendered to Ms. Taylor. It wasn’t until 12:47 a.m. that emergency personnel realized that she was seriously wounded, after her boyfriend called 911 (Callimachi 13-18).
Ms. Taylor had been focused on her future with Mr. Walker. But her history with 30-year-old Jamarcus Glover, an on-again off-again boyfriend who had spent years in prison, was hard to escape, even after she cut ties with him a month before the raid.
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Christopher 2X, a longtime community organizer whom Ms. Taylor’s family turned to after her death, said her relationship with Mr. Glover had to be acknowledged. “You can’t just look away from it and act like it’s not there,” he said. “My hope is courageous people will say: ‘There it is — it’s what it is — but was this shooting justified? She should be alive today.’”
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By the end of 2019, the city had taken possession of nearly half of the vacant buildings and was working to acquire the rest — among them 2424 Elliott, 2425 Elliott, 2426 Elliott and 2427 Elliott. There, according to court records, Jamarcus Glover and his associates operated a series of “trap houses,” where they stashed crack cocaine, marijuana and prescription pills.
An informant sent inside No. 2424 reported that six men were packaging crack cocaine and passing it to customers through a mail slot in a security door.
On Dec. 30, days after the new squad was started, police executed search warrants at Nos. 2424 and 2426 and a house a few blocks away, seizing eight guns, a surveillance system and 4.9 grams of crack, according to a police log. Mr. Glover was arrested, along with five others, and soon released on bail.
On Jan. 2, Detective Joshua Jaynes of the Place-Based Investigations unit asked for a camera to be installed overlooking the 2400 block of Elliott, according to an internal report he signed. Within an hour, it had captured between 15 and 20 cars briefly stopping in front of No. 2424. “Indicative of narcotics trafficking,” his report says.
At 5:53 p.m., a white Chevrolet Impala pulled up in front of the house, and Mr. Glover exited. The car was registered to Breonna Taylor, the report says.
Over the next two months, the new squad surveilled the Elliott addresses where Mr. Glover operated, and Ms. Taylor’s apartment 10 miles away. A GPS device the police put on Mr. Glover’s car tracked it to her apartment complex six times, according to the internal report. And Ms. Taylor’s new car — a Dodge Charger — was seen at the trap house on multiple occasions; she was photographed in front of it in mid-February.
[Did the detectives have sufficient evidence to tie Ms. Taylor to Mr. Glover and seek a warrant to search her apartment?]
The warrant cited five pieces of information establishing what the police said was probable cause: Mr. Glover’s car making repeated trips between the trap house and Ms. Taylor’s home; her car’s appearance in front of 2424 Elliott on multiple occasions; surveillance footage of him leaving her apartment with a package in mid-January; a postal inspector’s confirmation that Mr. Glover used her address to receive parcels; and database searches indicating that as of late February, he listed her apartment as his home address.
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Court records show that Mr. Glover was convicted of selling cocaine and spent years in prison, starting in 2008 in his home state of Mississippi, where he was handed a 17-year sentence. In 2014, after moving to Kentucky, he was convicted of a second drug offense. He began dating Ms. Taylor in 2016, according to a statement he gave the police (Callimachi 4, 7-9).
In the terabytes of call logs, surveillance tapes, database searches and other evidence detailing her connection to Mr. Glover, the Louisville police appeared to miss the new arc that the young woman’s life had taken, an oversight that would have calamitous consequences.
“Breonna was a woman who was figuring everything out in her life, who had turned a corner,” said Mr. Aguiar, the lawyer. “Breonna was starting to live her best life.”
Ms. Taylor was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., to a 16-year-old single mother. Her father, Everett Taylor, has been in prison since she was a child, the lawyer said. He was convicted of murder when she was 6, after shooting a man who had failed to pay for a rock of crack cocaine, court records show.
Family and friends describe the mother and daughter as close. “She was a better version of me,” said her mother, Tamika Palmer, a dialysis technician. “Full of life. Easy to love.”
As a girl, Ms. Taylor was considered by other parents to be the responsible one among their daughters’ friends. She woke them up to get to school on time after sleepovers, practiced mock interviews for an after-school job in ninth grade in Louisville, where her family had moved, and tried to dream big.
“Graduating this year on time is so important to me because I will be the first in my family to accomplish this,” she wrote in her scrapbook during her senior year, next to a photo of herself in a cap and gown. “I want to be the one who finally breaks the cycle of my family’s educational history. I want to be the one to finally make a difference.”
She enrolled at the University of Kentucky and a year later, in 2012, began a banter on Twitter with Mr. Walker, then a student at a university two and a half hours away. He was 20, she was 19. The flirtatious tweets grew into a friendship, and then a romance four years later, according to his account.
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They began dating in the summer of 2016, he said. But a few months later, she started seeing Mr. Glover. For nearly four years — until weeks before her death — she went back and forth between the two men, Mr. Walker told the police.
Her family and friends are effusive about Mr. Walker, a former warehouse worker for Coca-Cola, describing him as “good for her” and “a man who treated her right.” None of them would discuss Mr. Glover.
Her social media posts and Mr. Glover’s, combined with court and police records, suggest he came into her life at a low point: She had dropped out of college and become an E.M.T., but she quit after a year, discouraged by the 16-hour shifts and low pay.
At times, she struggled to afford groceries, she said in one tweet. In another she wrote: “I pray 2018 is a better year for me financially. I mean by the grace of God, I always made sure my bills were covered but it’s been a long struggle & I’m over it.”
Around that time, her younger sister, Juniyah, moved in with her. Ms. Taylor was intent on setting a good example for her and for an infant goddaughter who began spending several nights a week at their home, according to Mr. Aguiar.
“These two beautiful little girls right here are my world,” she wrote in her scrapbook. “They look up to me, so when they’re around it’s almost like I become an entire new person. I know they’re watching my every move, so I make sure I don’t do anything wrong.”
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In mid-February, she finally ended her relationship with Mr. Glover and committed to Mr. Walker, her family’s lawyer said. Among her last tweets was a message about setting a good example: “Gotta watch how you let men treat/deal with you especially when you got lil sisters/cousins looking up to ya” (Callimachi 10-12).
Two more officers involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor have been fired — a detective believed to have fired the fatal shot and another who sought the search warrant that led to the deadly raid …
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Detectives Myles Cosgrove, who shot Taylor, and Joshua Jaynes, who sought the warrant for the March 13 drug raid, were informed of their firings on Tuesday. Their dismissals follow that of officer Brett Hankison, who was fired in September after being indicted by a grand jury on charges of endangering Taylor’s neighbors by firing bullets that went through her home and into an adjacent apartment.
… None of the three white officers who fired into her home were charged by a grand jury in her death.
Investigators said Cosgrove fired 16 rounds into the apartment after police breached the front door and Taylor’s boyfriend fired a shot at them. Federal ballistics experts said they believe the shot that killed Taylor came from Cosgrove.
In Cosgrove’s dismissal letter, interim Police Chief Yvette Gentry wrote that the detective violated the department’s use-of-force policies for firing 16 shots without identifying a target and for not activating his body camera. …
“The shots you fired were in three different directions, indicating you did not verify a threat or have target acquisition,” Gentry wrote.
Jaynes, the detective who sought the narcotics warrant that led to the raid, was “untruthful” about how he obtained some information about Taylor in the warrant, Gentry wrote. Jaynes was not at the scene the night Taylor was shot.
In a May interview with Louisville police investigators, Jaynes acknowledged that he did not personally verify that a drug-trafficking suspect [Glover] was receiving mail at Taylor’s apartment, even though he had said in an earlier affidavit that he had. Jaynes said he relied instead on information from a fellow officer.
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In September, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who took on the role of special prosecutor in the case, said Cosgrove and Mattingly were not charged with Taylor’s killing because they acted to protect themselves. The decision disappointed and angered protesters who have been calling for justice for Taylor for six months, and they vowed to stay in the streets until all the officers involved were fired or someone was charged with her killing.
Three grand jurors have since come forward to say that Cameron did not allow the grand jury to consider homicide-related charges against the officers for Taylor’s death. Speaking anonymously, the jurors said they believe they would have brought criminal charges against the officers if given the chance (Lovan 1-2).
The Justice Department will launch an investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department to determine if there is a pattern of discrimination or excessive force within its ranks, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday [April 26, 2021].
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"The investigation will assess whether LMPD [Louisville Metro Police Department] engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force, including with respect to people involved in peaceful, expressive activities," Garland said.
"It will determine whether LMPD engages in unconstitutional stops, searches and seizures, as well as whether the department unlawfully executes search warrants on private homes."
The city settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Taylor's family in September for $12 million. The settlement included a series of police reforms. Louisville had earlier also banned no-knock warrants.
The police department fired one of the officers involved in the killing last year. The department said officer Brett Hankison "displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life."
Monday's announcement follows the launch of a similar "pattern or practice" investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department last Wednesday. That move came a day after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on murder charges for the death of George Floyd (Wise 1-2).
[The New York Times put together an excellent video that chronicles what transpired at Breonna Taylor’s apartment. I recommend that you view it. Click this link]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaNU7yDnsc
Works cited:
Callimachi, Rukmini. “Breonna Taylor’s Life Was Chinging. Then Police Came to Her Door.” The New York Times, August 30, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/breonna-taylor-police-killing.html
Duvall, Tessa and Costello, Darcy. “Breonna Taylor Was Briefly Alive after Police Shot Her. But No One Tried To Treat Her.” Louisville Courier Journal, updated March 13, 2021. Net. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/crime/2020/07/17/breonna-taylor-lay-untouched-20-minutes-after-being-shot-records/5389881002/
Lovan, Dylan. “2 Detectives Involved in Breonna Taylor’s Death Are Fired.” AP News, January 6, 2021. Net. https://apnews.com/article/breonna-taylor-cops-fired-910c87438ebc09e74eac8a4f4678fb63
Wise, Alana. “DOJ To Investigate Louisville Police in Response to Death of Breonna Taylor.” NPR, April 26, 2021. Net. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990935662/justice-dept-to-investigate-louisville-police-in-response-to-death-of-breonna-ta
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