Taylor’s life was changing. Then police came
EMT was focused on future and past troubled boyfriend
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. 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 26-year-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 had already 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.
Taylor, struck five times, bled out on the floor.
Taylor has since become an icon, 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.
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.
Nearly six months after Taylor’s killing, the story of what happened that night remains largely untold.
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 whoknewher,aswellasa review of more than 1,500 pages of police records. The Louisville Metro Police Department, citing pending investigations, declined 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 night.
Sloppy surveillance outside her apartment 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 compounded the risks that night.
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. Only one neighbor 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 30-year-old Jamarcus Glover, an on-again offagain boyfriend who had spent years in prison, was hard to escape, even after she cut ties with him.
When officers rammed the door of the apartment, Walker later explained, he fired his gun because he feared it was her ex-boyfriend.
Almost a dozen neighbors interviewed for this article said that they never heard the police calling out, including Clifford Tudor, who had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Only one person, a truck driver coming off his shift, said he heard the officers shouting. Aaron Julue Sarpee had left his 2-year-old in the care of the woman living directly above Taylor. Before the police lined up, he had run upstairs and picked up his sleeping toddler. He had just stepped out onto the exterior staircase when he saw the officers.
Before they ordered him to go back inside, Sarpee said, he heard at least three loud bangs as they knocked on Taylor’s door, and heard one or more officers scream “Police!” — a single time. 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 ex-boyfriend, he later told police.
Mattingly said that as soon as the door was punched in and he cleared the threshold, he could see to the end of the long hallway. There, in silhouette, he saw a male and a female figure. The man’s hands were stretched out, holding an object.
“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. But like numerous other jurisdictions, Kentucky also has a statute protecting police officers who use deadly force in self-defense.
Sometime between 12:41 and 12:42 a.m. according to call logs, the rights guaranteed by those statutes clashed.
“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 scooted out onto the breezeway, then stumbled into the parking lot, where he collapsed, 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.”