USA TODAY International Edition
What the neighbor saw through her peephole
Residents say they didn’t hear police ID at door
Deja Moore had just fallen asleep when the crack of gunfire jarred her awake.
She got up and went to her front door in the St. Anthony Gardens apartment complex in Louisville, Kentucky.
In the apartment directly across from her was a 26- year- old tenant named Breonna Taylor.
As Moore walked toward the door, the gunfire stopped. Then she heard the click of fresh magazines being loaded into guns, she said.
“What really took me for a loop was when I heard them reload and start firing again,” she told The Courier Journal on Monday.
It was a little past midnight on March 13. Louisville Metro Police Department Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detectives Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison had fired about 30 rounds into Taylor’s apartment across the hall.
Taylor was allegedly linked to a convicted drug trafficker involved in a narcotics investigation, and officers were there to carry out a “no- knock” warrant, Moore learned later.
Moore said she had not seen Jamarcus Glover, LMPD’s person of interest and Taylor’s ex- boyfriend, around the complex in roughly a year.
Moore looked through the peephole, and Taylor’s “door was swung wide open already,” she said, “and I could
see them rushing the officer to the car, so they could take him to the hospital.”
Police said Mattingly was shot in the thigh by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who told authorities he fired a “warning shot,” assuming intruders were breaking in.
Moore heard police dogs and officers yelling for Walker to come out with his hands up and to drop to his knees.
She heard Walker crying, saying that he didn’t know what was wrong, that his girlfriend had been shot. They just kept yelling, “Walk back!” “I’m thinking, ‘ What that hell is going on? It’s 1 o’clock in the morning,’” Moore said. Police were everywhere with guns drawn.
When the chaos began to settle, Moore noticed the doorway across the hall was clear, so she peered into Taylor’s apartment.
“I could see her dead body in the hallway, just laying there,” she said. “They ( the police) were just walking over the body, walking through the house saying, ‘ Clear!’ like it was nothing.”
According to MetroSafe dispatch logs, Taylor lay without receiving medical attention for more than 20 minutes in the hallway where she was shot. She was fatally shot at approximately 12: 43 a. m.
Roughly 61⁄ months later, one of
2 three LMPD officers involved in the incident has been charged – but not for Taylor’s death. Hankison, who is accused of blindly firing from outside Taylor’s residence into another occupied apartment, faces three counts of first- degree wanton endangerment.
He pleaded not guiltyto the charges Monday. Hankison was fired by the police department before the grand jury’s indictments were handed down.
No one has been held directly responsible for Taylor’s death.
Moore and Seny Soumaoro, who has lived upstairs for more than a year, said they are not satisfied with the outcome of the investigation and the indictment by the grand jury.
“They put everybody’s life in danger,” Moore said.
She cited unmarked police cars, officers climbing on her patio, guns pointed at other apartments and bullets that penetrated walls beyond the confines of Taylor’s home.
During the shooting, Soumaoro’s boyfriend, Henry, ran to her room to check on her. She hid underneath the covers with her 3- month- old infant, Marcel. When the gunfire stopped, all she heard was voices downstairs but she did not know who was speaking.
She refused to leave the apartment or even look to see what was happening. It wasn’t until the morning that she learned her neighbor had been killed.
According to Moore and Soumaoro, neither heard the police announce themselves early that morning before crashing into Taylor’s apartment. This detail has become a point of dispute throughout Taylor’s case.
Though both of them were asleep, Moore said that if police had knocked, she would have heard it.
“We have hollow walls,” Moore said. “As you can see, knocking on other people’s doors, we might open ours, thinking it’s our door, because we can hear everything.”
Moore and Soumaoro were not close to Taylor, but Moore and Taylor shared similar work schedules, so they often exchanged “hellos” and “goodbyes” in the morning on their way to work, she said.
In the wake of the incident, Soumaoro wants to move.
“I’m scared,” she said. “You never know. Anything can happen.”
Moore plans on staying put. She has yet to explain to her daughter Maddison, 8, the “grown- up details” of what happened that night.
“( The police) could have gone the wrong way … since they done ( messed) up everything else,” Moore said. “Then to find out that ( Glover) was already in police custody makes it even worse, because all of this could have been prevented.
“She could have still been alive, and we wouldn’t have had to go through none of this.”
When Moore leaves or enters her apartment, she looks down at the mat that has sat outside her door since long before Taylor was killed.
Initially, what the mat says was a joke; a warning of sorts to intruders. Now its significance carries more weight, she said, and forces her to look at life completely differently.
In bold black letters, the mat reads, “Nothing inside is worth dying for.”