Shot dead by the police: Will Breonna Taylor ever get justice?

Sheila Price was woken by the sound of commotion. Of gunshots. When she stepped on to her balcony, she understood why. Barely 100ft from her home, she could see and hear armed police, their weapons drawn on a young black man, screaming at him to put his hands in the air. She watched as he got to his knees, and they ran in to arrest him. 

“They put him down on his knees, they handcuffed him, and walked him to the car,” recalls the 52-year-old teacher. “And then next thing you know, SWAT trucks come through, and they go through the apartment.

“They roped off the rest of the complex, and that was it. I went all quiet after that.”

What she did not learn until the following morning, was that she had witnessed the concluding parts of the police operation that resulted in the shooting dead of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old African American, killed by those police officers, who then detained her boyfriend.

What she similarly did not realise when she went back to bed that spring night, was that the young woman’s body, riddled with bullets, was still lying in the nearby apartment, with at least one of its walled spattered with blood.

“It was the next morning when I was getting ready to go to work that I realised this woman had been shot,” says Price. “I was like ‘Oh my God, what is going on’. And I was just devastated, because this happened in my apartment complex, and I could not believe it.”

That was on 13 March. In the weeks and months since then, the struggle to secure justice for the killing of the young woman has become embedded in the narrative of a year in which the United States has been rocked by mass protests and demands for racial justice, the scale of which have not been seen for 50 years.

And as the numerous names of other people of colour killed by the police have been inextricably linked to the places in which they were killed – Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in New York, Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas, Michael Brown in Ferguson – so too is the name of Breonna Taylor rubber-stamped with Louisville, Kentucky, a city of 600,000 people to which her mother moved from Michigan, 12 years ago.

One of the reasons the young women’s name has become so well known have been the demonstrations and vigils, organised every by day by protesters in Louisville. Some have involved clashes with police, and have turned violent, but the vast majority have been peaceful. Currently, the city’s Jackson Square Park has become transformed by round-the-clock vigils, filled by images of the young woman, people lighting candles, or else sharing songs and stories.

Another reason, almost certainly, is the killing by police two months later, of another unarmed person of colour, in a different American city, in a different American state.

The 25 May killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sparked protests that rapidly rippled outwards from the midwestern city, across the county and around the world.

The scale of the protests, and their intensity, was likely the result of the man’s death at the hands of a white police officer having been captured on video footage. If not everyone in the country watched eight minutes and 46 seconds of officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s throat as he gasped that he could not breathe; they watched enough to be horrified and outraged.

As the protests grew, with the initial demand to hold to account the Minneapolis officers and a much broader demand for racial equity, so the movement amplified the demands for justice for other victims, such as the young woman from Louisville. At any of the Black Lives Matter, or racial justice protests still happening to this day in cities such as Portland and Seattle, the names of Floyd and Taylor have joined those of Garner, Brown and Bland on the banners and placards of demonstrators.

Another reason, has been the courage displayed by Taylor’s family and friends, notably her mother, Tamika Palmer, and younger sister, Juniyah. Along with an aunt, Bianca Austin, and assisted by lawyers such as Lonita Baker and Ben Crump, the young woman’s mother has made herself the point of the spear, seeking accountability.

In an interview at her home in the city’s West End, about 10 miles from the apartment complex where her daughter lived, Palmer told The Independent she was motivated by several factors.

One was to secure justice for her daughter, another was to protect such a fate befalling other people of colour, including Juniyah.

“She’s had to become this activist, this person who’s fighting constantly against the world. It’s sad because she doesn't get to be her 20-year-old-self. I feel a little of who she may have wanted to be has become lost in this,” she says, sitting on her sofa in a room with the blinds down. “So I have to make sure that she doesn't become a Breonna Taylor.”

Last month, the city of Louisville paid $12m to the family of Ms Taylor to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. It also agreed to a dozen changes demanded by the young woman’s family in the way the police operate. Most prominent among these was the passing of “Breonna’s Law”, which banned the kind of “no knock” search warrants that led police to storm into her house unannounced.

Yet, if that was a step forward, authorities also announced they were not going to charge the three police officers – Myles Cosgrove, Jonathan Mattingly and Brett Hankison – who between them fired 30 shots. Authorities said because Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who legally carried a gun, had fired at police in self defence, unaware of who was storming Taylor’s apartment when the officers returned fire, they did so legally. (Hankison was charged with a lesser offence of wanton endangerment, because one of the rounds he fired entered a neighbouring apartment.)

The young woman was hit by six bullets. An FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, determined that Cosgrove fired 16 shots, Hankison let off 10 and Mattingly fired six. A round fired by Cosgrove, which lodged near the heart, was judged to have most likely been the fatal blow.

While the settlement with police involved no admission of wrongdoing, Taylor’s family is hoping the ongoing FBI investigation into the events that led to her death, may give grounds for a federal prosecution of the officers, on the grounds that her civil rights were abused.

In a statement, the FBI declined to say where it was in its investigation. “FBI Louisville continues its federal criminal investigation into all aspects of the death of Breonna Taylor. This work will continue beyond the state charges announced a couple of weeks ago,” said spokesperson Katie Anderson.

“We are investigating any violation of federal criminal law, which includes potential civil rights violations. Unfortunately, as this is an ongoing investigation, we cannot comment on any specifics of the case.”

The family is pushing to ensure that charges initially brought against the young woman’s boyfriend, and later dropped, are not reinstated. Acting in what he insists was self defence, he fired a single shot which hit one of the officers in the leg.

Sam Aguiar, a Louisville attorney who is part of the Taylor family legal team, says he believed the decision not to bring indictments against the three officers, announced by Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, may have been politically motivated, and that it was in line with the general thinking of the Trump administration, and the nation’s attorney general, William Barr.

He claims the same evidence put before a different prosecutor could have resulted in a decision to charge and that there was adequate reason to do so.

“Justice for Breonna has always been more broad than just firing these officers or arresting them or convicting them. Breonna is a kind of symbol of change throughout the world,” he says.

He says the FBI investigation could throw up more evidence, but says the prosector has already made clear he will not pursue charges against the three officers over the shooing of the young woman.

He says change needs to come at a legislative level, with the new laws that make it easier to fire “bad apples” from the force, and red-flag warnings about officers with a bad record. (Hankison had been reprimanded by senior officers a number times since joining the Louisville Metro police department in 2003.)

“At the same time, if we're talking about a situation where … you don't indict the officer who shot [at] her 16 times blindly, some of the time when she was on the ground, then that that's still a failure,” he adds.

Charles Booker believes justice for Breonna Taylor might be even more comprehensive.

The 36-year-old African-American state legislator came within less than 20,000 votes of defeating Amy McGrath in the Democratic primary to decide who would challenge Republican Mitch McConnell in this year’s Senate race. As he points out, he did so against one of the hugely funded campaigns in Senate history. 

Booker, who heads the Hood to the Holler initiative that seeks to build a coalition of both urban and poor working people, says there must be accountability for all the mistakes that led up to and resulted in the young woman’s death.

“But we’re also talking about the structural issues that have allowed a city like Louisville, my hometown, Brianna’s hometown, to be one of the more segregated cities in the country,” he says.

“And the fact that we have whole communities with tens of thousands of people that don't have access to healthy food, that are dealing with high unemployment, dealing with environmental injustice and racism. We’re calling all of those things out, too.”

He adds: “That’s why this moment is so important, because what happened to Breonna has shined a brighter light on all of the systemic challenges we face. It’s building a bigger coalition of people that feel a sense of connectedness to it, an urgency to demand change. And that’s why I believe that we will be able to make some profound change coming out of all of this.”

All of this is playing out just days before an election in which the struggle for racial justice has been a bigger part of the conversation than for many years. While Donald Trump offered his condolences to the young woman’s family, he has never called them. And he has repeatedly denounced people who take to the streets to demand justice, as terrorists or anarchists.

By contrast Joe Biden, whose patchy record on race relations has been at least partly papered over by his decision to select Kamala Harris as his running mate, has called the family. Harris, the first woman of colour on the ticket of a major US party, has spoken to her more than once.

And pressured by the likes of progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Booker in the primary over McGrath, Biden’s policy platform includes several initiatives to reform the criminal justice system. It also specifically draws attention to the economic inequality longed endured by people of colour.

The centre of Jefferson Square Park is filled with a large painting of Breonna, her hair in deep, rich curls. There are candles and flowers and signs. There is a sense of hush. A sense of reverence, and of dignity.

A young woman called Kiki says she has little faith in the local police, claiming they are all covering all for each other. “I think the answer will come from the FBI,” says the 30 year-old.

A 65-year-old man who asks to be identified by his initials, PJ, says he has been a regular at the memorial site since the start. He says the protesters were not going to allow the authorities to “sweep things under the rug”.

How long does he believe the protesters will stay at so-called “Injustice Park”?

“I don’t know, I think people people are going to be here until there’s change,” he says. “They’re talking about building a shelter for the winter.”