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
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.
From the parking lot, undercover officers surveilling Taylor’s apartment before a drug raid saw only the blue glow of the television. But a clearer picture of Taylor’s death and life, of the person behind the cause, emerged from dozens of interviews with public officials and people who knew her, as well as a review of over 1,500 pages of police records, including evidence logs, transcripts of jailhouse recordings and surveillance photos. The Louisville Metro Police Department, citing a pending investigation, declined to answer simple questions about the case or make anyone available for interviews.
The officers have said that they did; Walker says he did not hear anything. In interviews with nearly a dozen neighbors, only one person said he heard the officers shout “Police!” a single time. When Glover called from jail after an earlier arrest in January, she told him that his brushes with the law worried her, according to a recording; each said “I love you” before hanging up. A GPS tracker police placed on his car later showed him making regular trips to her apartment complex, and surveillance photos showed her outside a drug house.
Christopher 2X, a longtime community organizer who Taylor’s family turned to after her death, said her relationship with 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.’”The fumbled raid that resulted in the young woman’s death was paradoxically set in motion by an attempt at police reform.
What Engel proposed was a departure from traditional practices in Louisville and other cities. Instead of targeting a large area for frequent traffic stops or going after specific criminals who are quickly replaced, focus on micro-locations: a storefront, a parking lot, a city block. The idea was to identify spots conducive to crime and adopt remedies, like cutting tall grass in a neighborhood where felons hide guns, or putting “No Parking” signs along a street where drug dealers idle in cars.
Aguiar, who has brought a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of Taylor’s family, has criticized the effort as gentrification run amok — an attempt to deliver a political win for the mayor, causing police to overreach. But community leaders and residents say they welcomed the investment. 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. Glover was arrested, along with five others, and soon released on bail.
The evidence collected on the Elliott houses was extensive, according to an application for a warrant to search the premises. And it appears to have been accurate: The same March night as the raid on Taylor’s apartment, the police struck No. 2424, where they found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic sachet containing cocaine and fentanyl, police logs and a laboratory report show.
Judge Mary Shaw, who signed the order, said she had “asked needed questions of the officer, reviewed the affidavits prepared for each warrant and subsequently made the probable-cause determination required of me by law.” But the lawyer also apologized to the public for having previously understated the extent of her relationship with the drug dealer, saying he had been unaware of the jailhouse recordings, which were first reported by The Louisville Courier Journal.
Investigators noted that they believed Taylor had no knowledge of the killing. But they wondered whether she was involved in Glover’s drug operation, according to a recording of a detective questioning them. He told her who to contact to arrange his bail, and added that after he was released, he would “come get me some rest in your bed.”
Hours after the raid and Taylor’s death, he claimed during a recorded jailhouse call to another girlfriend that Taylor had been holding thousands of dollars for him. On the call, Kiera Bradley, with whom he has a daughter, asked where to find bail money.“Bre had eight grand of your money?” Bradley responded, her voice rising.
“Breonna was a woman who was figuring everything out in her life, who had turned a corner,” said Aguiar, the lawyer. “Breonna was starting to live her best life.” “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.”
Her family and friends are effusive about 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 Glover. “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.”
At home, Taylor began writing goals on every scrap of paper — junk mail, napkins, envelopes — her mother said. “She would just make these bullet points. ‘I want to have this done by this time,’” she recalled. In mid-February, she finally ended her relationship with Glover and committed to 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!!”The night of the March raid, the plainclothes narcotics officers staking out the young woman’s apartment on Springfield Drive did one last drive-by at about midnight. Sgt.
Around the same time that the two undercover officers were doing their last drive-by of her apartment, a team of officers was executing three search warrants on Elliott Avenue. Five “no-knock” warrants had been signed by a judge that afternoon seeking evidence of drug trafficking by Glover and his associates.
Although the warrant for Taylor’s house had been approved as a “no-knock,” the officers were instructed at the briefing that they should do a “knock-and-announce” — knock first, then identify themselves as the police and give Taylor a chance to come to the door — according to Mattingly. 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 Taylor’s bedroom.
They left the bedroom and crept down the hallway toward the front door, which vibrated with each booming knock. “She’s yelling at the top of her lungs and I am, too, at this point, ‘Who is it?’ No answer, no response, no anything,” he said. Wine, the county prosecutor, said both the police version and Walker’s account of events could be correct: Through the door, he suggested, the police and the couple inside did not hear each other.
“As we’re coming to the door, the door, like, comes off the hinges,” Walker said. “It’s like an explosion.” He went on: They were scared. He thought someone was breaking in. He was trying to protect his girlfriend. “So, boom, one shot. Then all of a sudden there’s a whole lot of shots,” he said. “I just hear her screaming.”
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.
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