Boyfriend: Police to blame for her death
Kenneth Walker says he tried to protect Taylor
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Two men who traded gunshots at Breonna Taylor’s apartment the night she was fatally shot by police each say the other is to blame in her death.
One is Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, a 20-year Louisville officer who was shot during the March 13 attempted search of her apartment.
The other is Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend who said he was trying to protect his best friend.
“The impossible situation that Kenneth Walker put her in, in that hallway,” Mattingly said Tuesday. “With this narrow hallway, shooting from it, him diving out. … He put her in an impossible situation.”
Walker said Wednesday that Mattingly has no room to talk.
“Anything he says is irrelevant,” Walker said. “He’s a murderer. Not me.
“I’ve never killed anybody. He has, though.”
Both men spoke with The Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, and ABC News in separate interviews this week, recounting what they say happened at Taylor’s apartment that night and, ultimately,
suggesting who is to blame for the death of the unarmed 26-year-old Black woman.
Mattingly, who fired six shots into Taylor’s apartment, placed the blame squarely on the men she had chosen to date: Walker, and her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, the main target of the narcotics investigation that led police to Taylor’s door.
But Walker emphasized his gun didn’t kill Taylor.
“Whoever shot her is responsible for her death,” Walker said. “Whoever came with that person, you know, that shot her, they’re responsible. Whoever allowed them to come there and do that, they’re responsible.”
Steve Romines, an attorney for Walker, accused Mattingly of pawning off responsibility, suggesting it was “everybody but us – it’s the mayor’s fault, it’s Glover’s fault, it’s Walker’s fault, it’s our higher-ups.”
“It’s everybody’s fault,” he said, “but the people who killed her.”
Who is responsible for Breonna Taylor’s death?
Mattingly, branded by outraged protesters and police critics as a murderer, said Tuesday that officers were acting to defend their lives against gunfire.
“Two people were shot, so of course it didn’t go as smoothly as anybody would hope,” he said. “But I don’t think that was due to lack of judgment or training. I don’t think that was due to … incompetence.”
Asked who was to blame, then, for her death, the police sergeant pointed to Walker, along with Taylor’s ex-boyfriend and the “system” that had let him out of jail after previous run-ins with police.
“I think there’s a few people responsible,” Mattingly said. “I think (Walker) is. I think Jamarcus Glover is for using this girl in this way. I think he played on her emotions to get her to do what he wanted her to do.”
Glover, though, has denied that Taylor was ever involved in any drug activity.
“There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there,” Glover said in August.
Police secured the search warrant for her home based largely on surveillance that suggested Glover visited the apartment and may have picked up a package from there. That has since been challenged by a postal inspector, and a judge has said she’s concerned claims made in the search warrant affidavit were a lie.
Protesters in Louisville and around the country, along with attorneys for Taylor’s family, argue her death is just another example of overpolicing that disproportionately targets Black Americans and makes them the more frequent victims of police shootings.
Of the more than 5,700 people police have shot since 2015, 24% were Black, even though Black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, according to a Washington Post database of fatal shootings by on-duty police officers.
Moreover, a Courier Journal analysis of the criminal file compiled in Taylor’s case revealed a litany of problems by Louisville police, from the moment officers planned the search of her apartment, through its ill-conceived execution and afterward with the failure to control the crime scene and chaperone the officers involved in her death.
Mattingly, along with former Detective Brett Hankison and Detective Myles Cosgrove, fired 32 shots into the apartment, hitting Taylor six times and killing her in her hallway. None of the officers faces criminal charges for her death, though Hankison does face three counts of wanton endangerment for shots that penetrated a neighboring apartment where three people were home.
The day before the announcement he would not be indicted by the grand jury, Mattingly sent a six-paragraph email at 2:09 a.m. to more than 1,000 colleagues, arguing that he and the other officers had done the “legal, moral and ethical thing that night” at Taylor’s apartment.
Romines, Walker’s attorney, said the blame for Taylor’s death falls on the “entirety” of the Louisville Metro Police Department, including the “cops who went there that night.” Had they informed SWAT of their plans and had SWAT handled the search warrant, “there’s never a problem,” Romines said.
Had they done “legitimate surveillance,” he added, they may have known Walker was in the home.
“If they do a single professional thing, it never happens,” he said. “But it’s all somebody else’s fault.”
‘That doesn’t make sense’
Walker has said repeatedly that he fired a “warning” shot as the door burst open, thinking it was an intruder breaking in and wanting to protect Taylor.
He said in a recorded police interview hours after the shooting that if he’d known it was police, he would have had no reason not to answer the door or let them in the apartment.
Mattingly pushed back against that contention in his interview with the Courier Journal and ABC News on Tuesday. He said if Walker thought it was intruder, why didn’t he tell Taylor to hide in a closet while he went to see who was knocking? Why didn’t he come out of the house until more than 10 minutes after the shooting? And why did it take so long for him to call 911 operators?
“Why would you kick the gun in the other room if you thought it was intruders? There’s just a lot of things that, common sense, you look at and go, ‘That doesn’t make sense,’” Mattingly said.
In his opinion, Mattingly said, Walker likely knew it was police knocking, partly because the officer said you don’t have “that loud of a knock, that loud of an announce, that long – and people not know it’s the police.”
He also described seeing Walker in a shooting stance that mirrored his before the shot was fired.
Walker, however, told the Courier Journal that he couldn’t see through the dark of the apartment. And he reiterated that he and Taylor had no reason not to answer the door for police.
“They would have came in there and tore up the place and they would have not found nothing,” Walker said.
Mattingly argued in his interview that no drugs or money being found after the shooting didn’t mean that no drugs or money were in the apartment.
Pointing to the search warrant crafted by the Public Integrity Unit investigators handling the search after he and Taylor were shot, Mattingly emphasized that they weren’t authorized to complete the search sought by the Place-Based Investigations Unit.
The later warrant authorized police to seize cellphones, clothing, shell casings, firearms and printed material with information on the occupants of the residence, among other evidence connected to the shootings, but not drugs or cash.
Romines scoffed at that argument, dismissing it as a complaint that the officers who shot and killed Taylor didn’t get to conduct the search.
“That is literally their complaint at this point in time: The people who killed her didn’t get the apartment to themselves to search for something incriminating,” Romines said.
As for the investigators looking into the fatal police shooting: “You tell me they’re searching that apartment and they find drugs or money, they’re not going to report it?”