A year ago Saturday, a trio of white officers with the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department arrived outside the door of an apartment in South Louisville and started knocking, startling awake the Black couple inside, Breonna Taylor and Kenneth Walker. They had been asleep, or almost asleep, after watching a movie in bed. It was nearly 1 a.m.
If you believe the officers, what happened next is this: They identified themselves as police, battered down the front door and were greeted by gunfire, prompting the police to return fire.
The only survivor from the other side of the door recalls things differently: The plainclothes officers did not say who they were before suddenly bursting in through the front door while Walker and Taylor cautiously peered down the hallway, and so Walker fired, prompting the three armed men to spray the apartment with bullets ― killing his girlfriend. Body camera footage from later that night showed Walker crying, asking repeatedly, “What is this about?”
Taylor’s death was originally described by the police department in a news release titled, “LMPD officer shot, suspect dead following narcotics investigation.” Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was the “suspect.”
Except she wasn’t.
Although they paid dearly for the botched raid, neither Taylor nor Walker were suspects in the narcotics investigation that produced the “no knock” warrant LMPD officers Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly used to break into the apartment that night. Taylor’s senseless death became a rallying cry in a summer of protests against racism and police brutality that transfixed the country and the world. The demand for justice on her behalf became a meme: “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.”
Now, one year later, lawmakers and celebrities and activists alike are remembering her, and arguing that far too little has changed.
“We #SayHerName as a call for justice,” civil rights activist Bernice King tweeted.
“Today marks 365 days of injustice,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) wrote.
“A Black woman was murdered by the police in her home, in the middle of the night, and nothing has fundamentally changed,” Bush tweeted. “That’s why we won’t stop saying her name. That’s why we have to legislate in defense of Black lives in Congress.”
“The system was built to allow this. Don’t ignore that. Get involved,” tweeted filmmaker Ava DuVernay.
Taylor’s death and the media attention that came later brought “no knock” warrants under intense scrutiny; they are now banned in Louisville and an increasing number of jurisdictions around the country.
Yet none of the police officers involved in serving the warrant that night have been charged in connection with Taylor’s death.
A grand jury decision in late September led to the indictment of only one of the three cops who were present ― Hankison ― and only because he had fired bullets that entered a neighboring apartment, wantonly endangering the residents there. Cosgrove and Mattingly fired bullets that stayed in Taylor’s apartment, and they were not charged due to Kentucky’s self-defense laws.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident at Taylor’s home, the only person arrested was Walker. Officers ended up firing more than 30 rounds toward Taylor and Walker, who says neither one of them had any idea why their home was being raided, and one of his bullets hit Mattingly in the leg.
When Walker was released to home confinement in late March of last year, the Fraternal Order of Police released a scathing statement against the judge who made the call. Local news said police were “livid,” even though their own fatal mistakes were already apparent.
The person whose name was on the warrant for Taylor’s apartment was an ex-boyfriend who did not live there, and no drugs were found in the home. The ex-boyfriend had actually been apprehended earlier in the night by a different set of officers in a different part of town, drawing more criticism of LMPD procedure.
“Had Breonna Taylor been killed by anyone except police, the person or persons responsible for her death would have been charged with a homicide,” a lawyer for Walker said in a court document filed in March of last year.
The case began getting national attention in May, when video footage emerged showing the shocking death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. A couple weeks before, video had shown Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man out for a jog, being chased by armed white men, who have been charged with killing Arbery.
Calls for justice helped to propel demonstrations nationwide.
Attention then turned to who Breonna Taylor had been, aside from a victim of police violence.
“She had a whole plan on becoming a nurse and buying a house and then starting a family. Breonna had her head on straight, and she was a very decent person,” her mother, Tamika Palmer, told the Louisville Courier Journal.
“She didn’t deserve this. She wasn’t that type of person,” Palmer said.
Taylor’s younger sister, Ju’Niyah Palmer, told The Washington Post how she and her sister had been nearly inseparable. They lived together at the apartment where Taylor died; Palmer was travelling at the time.
“She was my person,” Palmer told the Post, adding, “I was her shadow.”
“She felt like 2020 was definitely going to be her year. Everything was going the way she wanted it,” she said.
Charges against Walker have since been dropped. In an extraordinary turn, a few members of the grand jury convened to weigh in on Taylor’s case are currently lobbying to impeach Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron for his role in prosecuting the officers.
Although grand jurors are almost always sworn to secrecy, a Kentucky judge decided to permit the jurors to speak freely in late October. And so some of them did, challenging Cameron’s handling of the case while protecting their identities for safety reasons.
“The grand jury did not have homicide offenses explained to them,” one of the jurors revealed. “The grand jury never heard about those laws. Self-defense or justification was never explained either. Questions were asked about additional charges and the grand jury was told there would be none because the prosecutors didn’t feel they could make them stick.”
Three members of the grand jury filed a petition to impeach Cameron in late January for breaching public trust, a suggestion the Republican state attorney general said lacks “legal and factual support.”
In the search for justice for Breonna Taylor, a sliver of hope may lie in a federal investigation into the incident that has been quietly chugging along.
“The civil rights investigation will turn the whole situation upside-down,” Cynthia Deitl, the former head of the FBI’s civil rights unit who has overseen similar police shooting probes, told The Associated Press this week. “You look at everything — everything the officers ever learned.”
“It takes time to build a case against police officers.”