Taylor’s life was changing; then police came to her door
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, where he lived alone and she had left a toothbrush and a flat iron. But that night, they went to the small unit she shared with her younger sister, who was away on a trip. It was dark when the couple pulled into the parking lot, then closed the door to Apartment 4 behind them.
This was the year of big plans for the 26year- old: Her home was brimming with the Post- it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals.
She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with Walker. They already had chosen a name.
She fell asleep next to him just after midnight March 13, the movie still playing. “The last thing she said was, ‘ Turn off the TV,’ ” he said in an interview.
From the parking lot, undercover officers surveilling Taylor’s apartment before a drug raid saw only the blue glow of the television.
When they punched in the door with a battering ram, Walker, fearing an intruder, reached for his gun and let off one shot, wounding an officer. He and another officer returned fire, while a third began blindly shooting through Taylor’s window and patio door. Bullets ripped through nearly every room in her apartment, then into two adjoining ones. They sliced through a soap dish, a chair and a table and shattered a sliding- glass door.
Taylor, struck five times, bled out on the floor.
Taylor has since become an icon, her silhouette a symbol of police violence and racial injustice. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris spoke her name during their speeches at the Democratic convention. Oprah Winfrey ceded the cover of her magazine for the first time to feature the young Black woman, and paid for billboards with her image across Louisville.
Beyoncé called for the three white officers who opened fire to be charged criminally. NBA stars including LeBron James devoted postgame interviews to keeping her name in the news.
In Louisville, demonstrators have led nightly protests downtown, where most government buildings and many businesses are now boarded up. As outrage mounted, the city fired one of the officers, pushed out the police chief and passed “Breonna’s Law,” banning “no knock” warrants, which allow the police to burst into people’s homes without warning. Protesters say that is not enough.
Nearly six months after Taylor’s killing, the story of what happened that night — and what came before and after — remains largely untold. Unlike the death of George Floyd, which was captured on video as a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck, Taylor’s final moments remain in shadow because no such footage exists.
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 more than 1,500 pages of police records, including evidence logs, transcripts of jailhouse recordings and surveillance photos. The Louisville Metro Police Department, citing pending investigations, declined to make anyone available for interviews.
The daughter of a teenage mother and a man who has been incarcerated since she was a child, Taylor attended college, trained as an EMT and hoped to become a nurse. But along the way, she developed a yearslong relationship with a twice- convicted drug dealer whose trail led police to her door that fateful night.
Sloppy surveillance outside her apartment in the hours before the raid failed to detect that Walker was there, so officers expected to find an unarmed woman alone. A failure to follow their own rules of engagement and a lack of routine safeguards, such as stationing an ambulance outside, compounded the risks.
While the department had gotten court approval for a “no knock” entry to search for evidence of drugs or cash from drug trafficking, the orders were changed before the raid to “knock and announce,” meaning that the police had to identify themselves.
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.
Sam Aguiar, a lawyer representing Taylor’s family, blames “catastrophic failures” by the police department for the young woman’s death. “Breonna Taylor,” he said, “gets shot in her own home, with her boyfriend doing what’s as American as apple pie, in defending himself and his woman.”
Taylor had been focused on her future with Walker. But her history with 30year- old Jamarcus Glover, an on- again off- again boyfriend who had spent years in prison, was hard to escape, even after she cut ties with him a month before the raid. When officers rammed the door of the apartment, Walker later explained, he fired his gun because he feared it was her ex- boyfriend.
The fumbled raid that resulted in the young woman’s death was paradoxically set in motion by an attempt at police reform.
In December 2019, the Louisville Police created its Place- Based Investigations unit. After analyzing crime statistics, it decided to focus on Elliott Avenue, a street of dilapidated and abandoned houses, according to city records.
There, according to court records, Glover and his associates operated a series of “trap houses,” where they stashed crack cocaine, marijuana and prescription pills.
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 and soon released on bail.
On Jan. 2, Detective Joshua Jaynes of the PlaceBased Investigations unit asked for a camera to be installed overlooking the 2400 block of Elliott. Within an hour, it had captured 15 to 20 cars briefly stopping in front of No. 2424. “Indicative of narcotics trafficking,” his report says.
At 5: 53 p. m., a white Chevrolet Impala pulled up in front of the house, and Glover exited.
The car was registered to Breonna Taylor, the report says.
Since Taylor’s death, what has emerged in bank statements, cellphone records, bail paperwork, audio recordings of police interrogations and other documents is a trail of evidence pointing to a complicated liaison between her and Glover, dating back to 2016.
In the years that followed, as Glover was in and out of jail on drug charges, Taylor paid at least $ 7,500 in bail for him and an associate in 2017 and 2019, according to bail paperwork.
Hours after the raid and Taylor’s death, Glover claimed during a recorded jailhouse call to another girlfriend that Taylor had been holding thousands of dollars for him.
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. Jonathan Mattingly said that he and Detective Mike Campbell drove along the front of the apartment complex and took note of the blue light emanating from the TV in Taylor’s bedroom, according to his statement to investigators.
They had failed to notice that she was not alone, according to police statements and court motions.
“When we all got up in line, I knocked on the door,” Mattingly told investigators. “Our intent was to give her plenty of time to come to the door because we said she was probably there alone,” he said. “Banged. No response. Banged on it again. No response. At that point we started announcing ourself, ‘ Police, please come to the door!’”
On the other side of the locked door was a 25- to 30foot hallway, cutting through the living room, passing her sister’s empty bedroom and ending at the door to Taylor’s bedroom.
The loud banging jarred her awake. “It scared her to death,” Walker said in his statement to the investigators. “First thing she said was, ‘ Who is it?’ No response,” he recounted.
The knocking continued. Walker, a licensed gun owner who said he’d never discharged his weapon outside a firing range, grabbed his 9 mm Glock.
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.
Almost a dozen neighbors interviewed for this article said that they never heard the police calling out. Only one person, a truck driver coming off his shift, said he heard the officers shouting. He is emphatic that they said it only once.
Because Walker said he did not realize who was at the door, he made a tragic assumption: The apartment was being broken into — and not just by anyone. He thought it was Taylor’s exboyfriend, he later told police.
“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.”
Kentucky law is clear: Under the “stand your ground” statute, citizens can use deadly force against an intruder inside their own home.
“As soon as the shot hit, I could feel the heat in my leg,” Mattingly recounted in his statement. “And so I just returned fire,” he said.
The bullet tore through the sergeant’s thigh, piercing the femoral artery. He stumbled into the parking lot, he recalled.
As officers outside scrambled to help him, no aid was rendered to Taylor. It wasn’t until 12: 47 a. m. that emergency personnel realized that she was seriously wounded, after her boyfriend called 911.
“I don’t know what’s happening. Someone kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend,” Walker cried on a recorded call to 911. When the operator asked if the young woman was alert and able to speak, he said: “No, she’s not,” and then, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”