Grand Jury audio details moments before Breonna Taylor raid.
Two very different accounts emerged Friday from either side of an apartment door in Louisville, the one that police officers knocked off its hinges in March as they delivered a search warrant at the home of Breonna Taylor.
In newly released audio from closed- door grand jury proceedings, there was conflicting testimony over what happened in the seconds before the police shot and killed Taylor, a Black emergency room technician whose death pulled people to the streets in protests across the country.
Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said in the new recordings that he was “scared to death” when he and Taylor heard pounding on the door in the middle of the night and got no response to their yelled queries of who was knocking.
The officers involved in the raid, though, insisted in interviews with investigators that they had loudly identified themselves as police before they burst through the door. It was only after one officer was shot, they said, that they opened fire at the couple, killing Taylor.
The dueling accounts of a chaotic and tragic night are captured in 15 hours of recordings from the grand jury’s examination of the fatal raid. For the first time, some of those directly involved in the police shooting — including neighbors, officers and Taylor’s boyfriend — are heard describing the fateful night.
“Next thing I know, she’s on the ground and the door’s busted open and I hear a bunch of yelling and just panicking,” Walker said in an interview with investigators in March that was played for the grand jury last week. “And she’s right here bleeding,” he adds of Taylor. “And nobody’s coming, and I’m just confused and scared.”
The grand jury concluded its work last week by bringing an indictment against one former officer for endangering Taylor’s neighbors; they brought no charges against the two officers who shot her.
Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky attorney general, released the recordings Friday after a judge ordered him to do so, but the recordings did not include the instructions that prosecutors gave to the 12 jurors. One juror said Cameron was deflecting blame by saying it was jurors who had opted not to indict the two officers who shot Taylor. ne of those officers, Detective Myles Cosgrove, who the FBI said fired the shot that killed Taylor, described in the audio being uncertain about exactly what occurred during the chaos after police used a battering ram to burst into Taylor’s apartment and were shot at by Walker.
“I just sensed that I’ve fired,” Cosgrove said in an interview last month that was played for the jurors. But, he added: “It’s like a surreal thing. If you told me I didn’t do something at that time, I’d believe you. If you told me I did do something, I’d probably believe you, too.”