USA TODAY International Edition
Shot by police, Taylor left dying without aid
Records reveal no effort to save Ky. woman for 20 minutes
“I don’t know what is happening. Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.” Kenneth Walker to 911 dispatcher
Just after midnight March 13, three Louisville, Kentucky, police officers fired more than 20 bullets into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, striking her five times. She was still alive – briefly.
For at least five minutes, she coughed, struggling for breath, according to her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who told investigators she was alive as he called her mom and yelled for help.
“( Police are) yelling like, ‘ Come out, come out,’ and I’m on the phone with her ( mom). I’m still yelling help because she’s over here coughing, and, like, I’m just freaking out,” Walker said in a recorded police interview three hours after the shooting.
The Jefferson County coroner disputed that account, telling The Courier Journal that Taylor probably died within a minute of being shot and couldn’t have been saved.
Records show no effort was made to save her. For more than 20 minutes after she was fatally shot at approximately 12: 43 a. m. by officers, Taylor, 26, lay where she fell in her hallway, receiving no medical attention, according to dispatch logs.
“Breonna, who was unarmed in her hallway, was struck by several rounds of gunfire. She was not killed immediately,” attorneys Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker
wrote in a revised lawsuit filed on behalf of Taylor’s family. “Rather, she lived for another five to six minutes before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on the floor of her home.”
Outside, officers shouted for Walker to exit and rushed to treat Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, putting a tourniquet on his thigh after Walker shot him while he and two other plainclothes officers forced their way into Taylor’s apartment on a “no- knock” search warrant.
“You have an LMPD officer shot. His fellow officers rush to save him, not knowing if they will be shot at if they try to go inside, and not knowing that anyone inside has been hit,” Mayor Greg Fischer said. “It is just a horrible tragedy that should never happen again.”
What happened after Taylor shot?
In the four months since her death, Taylor’s name has become a rallying cry for protesters demanding racial justice in Louisville and around the nation, lifted up alongside George Floyd and other Black Americans who died at the hands of police.
The records show that police didn’t take Walker into custody until more than 15 minutes after the shooting and didn’t radio in to dispatch about Taylor being inside the apartment until 1: 10 a. m. – nearly a half- hour after she was shot.
A copy of Taylor’s death certificate obtained by The Courier Journal lists her time of death as “approx. 0048.” That time has come into question from the coroner.
Jefferson County Coroner Barbara Weakley- Jones said the 12: 48 a. m. time was “an estimate” based on available information and what could be gleaned from Taylor’s body.
“If she had even been outside of an emergency room department at a hospital, and she got shot and sustained the same injury, they would not have been able to save her. … So there’s no way that even if they ( police) ran to her and tried to give her aid, they can’t do anything because it’s all internal injuries that you can’t stop,” Weakley- Jones said.
The coughing Walker described would have been “agonal” breathing, Weakley- Jones said, meaning Taylor’s heart had stopped but her body still had a few last gasps. Police haven’t said who fired the five shots that struck Taylor but said Mattingly, Detective Myles Cosgrove and Detective Brett Hankison fired their weapons.
Police Department spokeswoman Jessie Halladay declined to comment, saying it’s “not proper” while the case is under review by the state attorney general.
Mattingly and Cosgrove are on administrative reassignment. Hankison was fired in June and is appealing his termination. Attorneys for Taylor alleged that Hankison, who was outside the apartment and was accused of firing “blindly,” fired at least one of the fatal shots.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron declined to say whether the scope of his investigation has expanded beyond Hankison, Mattingly and Cosgrove, but at least one other officer, Joshua Jaynes, who sought the noknock warrants used in the investigation that night, was administratively reassigned by the department.
Taylor ‘ should be there alone’
To reconstruct a timeline of the aftermath of the fatal police shooting, The Courier Journal used timestamps from 911 calls, dispatch logs, police interviews and the amended complaint filed by Taylor’s family.
Before Louisville Metro Police Department officers banged on Taylor’s door at 12: 40 a. m., Walker and Taylor were at home in bed, watching the movie “Freedom Writers” on TV.
They’d gotten back around 9 p. m. after eating at Texas Roadhouse and giving a friend’s kids rides across town. It was Taylor’s first night off after a few consecutive days on 12- hour shifts as an ER technician, Walker told investigators.
She fell asleep as the movie played, and Walker wasn’t far behind, he told police.
“Literally, the night was over. If nobody knocked, we would’ve been asleep within 10 to 15 minutes,” he said.
Around 10 p. m., Mattingly and other officers were briefed on the plan to carry out the search warrant on Taylor’s apartment as part of a narcotics investigation, Mattingly said in a police interview roughly two weeks after the shooting.
He said they were told that Taylor wasn’t believed to have children or animals, that she “should be there alone,” based on surveillance by other officers, Mattingly told investigators.
Jamarcus Glover, who was named on the search warrant for Taylor’s apartment, was arrested the same night, 10 miles away at a house in the Russell neighborhood. Police had a separate warrant for that house.
About two weeks after the shooting, an investigator asked Mattingly if he remembered the name of the search warrant’s target.
“Not offhand,” he responded. “We didn’t write it. We didn’t do any of the investigation. We did none of the background.”
Another officer was responsible for watching Taylor’s apartment that night, Mattingly said.
The door ‘ comes off its hinges’
At 12: 40 a. m., police officers were in place outside Taylor’s apartment. Mattingly said he banged on the front door.
Walker said he and Taylor were in her bedroom when they heard the knocking.
They called out, asking who it was, but got no response, Walker said. He said he didn’t suspect it could have been police.
Mattingly heard no response and banged on the door again. “At that point,” he told investigators, “we start announcing ourselves ‘ Police! Please come to the door. Police! We have a search warrant.’ ”
Mattingly said he banged on the door “six or seven different time periods,” which “seems like an eternity when you’re up at a doorway.”
The knocking lasted 45 seconds to a minute, he estimated, before police used a battering ram to force their way into Taylor’s apartment, hitting the door three times before it opened.
Walker grabbed his gun, “scared to death,” as he and Taylor pulled on clothes and went to the door. They left the bedroom and hadn’t made it down the hallway before the door “comes off its hinges,” he said.
Walker told police he fired one shot as a warning, aimed at the ground.
“It happened fast, like an explosion. Boom, one shot,” Walker told investigators. “Then all of the sudden, there’s a whole lot of shots. We both drop to the ground. But I just hear her ( Taylor) screaming.”
Mattingly told investigators that while he was in the doorway, he saw a man and a woman in the hallway. Then, there was a shot.
“And as I turned in the doorway, he’s in a stretched- out position with his hands, with a gun,” Mattingly said. “And as soon as I clear, he fires. Boom.”
Mattingly felt a pain in his leg. He fired four times. He went around the door and fired two more rounds.
A series of shots in the apartment
At 12: 42 a. m., neighbors in the St. Anthony Garden Apartments started calling 911.
“In the apartment behind me, there was a lot of gunshots just now,” one neighbor told 911. “It just came out of nowhere. And it almost sounded like somebody was shooting back, but I’m not for sure.”
A dispatcher asked a different neighbor who called when she heard the gunshots.
“I called you as soon as I realized what it was,” the woman said.
At 12: 43 a. m., a call came into dispatch saying an officer had been shot.
Mattingly said he remembered Hankison yelling on the radio that an officer was in trouble.
Walker was charged with assault and attempted murder of a police officer.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine dismissed charges in late May and called for more investigation.
‘ Somebody come help her!’
Events moved quickly as the calls came in:
12: 44 a. m.: Police called in that they needed EMS and SWAT at Taylor’s apartment on Springfield Drive.
12: 45 a. m.: “Subj is still inside with AR,” a dispatch log said. A recording of calls radioed in, without time markers, included a report that “officers encountered rifle fire.”
Walker heard people outside. “Somebody come help her!” he screamed. Walker called his mom, who told him to “call 911 right now.”
12: 47 a. m.: Walker called 911.
“I don’t know what is happening,” Walker, 28, told a dispatcher. “Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.”
The dispatcher asked Walker where Taylor was shot.
“I don’t know,” Walker responded, crying. “She’s on the ground right now. I don’t know.”
The dispatcher asked whether Taylor was awake and able to speak.
“No, she’s not,” Walker said, then shouted, “Bre!”
The dispatcher asked if Walker could turn her over to see where she was shot.
Walker described seeing blood and cried, “Oh my God!”
Then he hung up. Dispatch tried to call back, but there was no answer. The entire conversation and call back took less than three minutes.
As police officers descended on Taylor’s apartment complex, Walker stayed inside and called Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer. He said he heard Taylor coughing.
“When I was on the phone with her, that’s when I kind of realized that it was the police because now they’re yelling, like, ‘ Come out, come out,’ ” Walker told investigators.
12: 54 a. m.: EMS left the apartment complex with Sgt. Mattingly. Walker prepared to leave the apartment.
1 a. m.: Walker was arrested. He told police investigators hours later that officers said he was going to jail for the rest of his life.
“They had the dog right there, right behind me, barking. I’m out there with no shoes on, clearly nothing, walking in water and stuff, backwards. And he’s like, ‘ I’m going to let this dog on you. You’re going to jail for the rest of your life,’ ” Walker said.
“( An officer) asked me, ‘ Were you hit by any bullets?’ I said no. He said, ‘ That’s unfortunate,’ ” Walker said.
1: 10 a. m.: In the apartment, roughly 27 minutes after Taylor was shot, police told dispatch there was a “F ( female) inside with gun kicked under the bed.”
1: 12 a. m.: Two minutes later, Taylor was reported to be “laying on ( the) ground in hallway,” according to dispatch. Police requested crime- scene tape.
3: 35 a. m.: Police returned with a second search warrant for Taylor’s apartment.
Inside, they found shell casings and bullets. There was no rifle located – just Walker’s Glock handgun. Police found no drugs.
The long- awaited results of the internal investigation examining the officers’ conduct is in the hands of Attorney General Cameron and the FBI, which will present its findings to the U. S. Department of Justice.
Neither has given any indication when a decision will be made.