Here’s what you need to know:
- Multiple police officers are shot during Louisville protests.
- The two officers who shot Ms. Taylor were not charged.
- In Louisville, protesters were dismayed by the grand jury’s decision.
- ‘There are Breonnas everywhere’: Protesters are gathering nationwide.
- A former officer was charged with ‘wanton endangerment.’ What does that mean?
- New details about the shooting are revealed.
- Police officers with a ‘no-knock’ warrant broke down Ms. Taylor’s door.
Multiple police officers are shot during Louisville protests.
Two Louisville police officers were shot during demonstrations on Wednesday night, a police spokesman said, after a grand jury decided to not charge any officer in the killing of Breonna Taylor.
“We have had officers shot tonight,” the spokesman, Sgt. Lamont Washington, said in a statement. The police said at a news conference that both officers were in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries; one of the officers was in surgery.
Although no officer was charged with killing Ms. Taylor, grand jurors indicted Brett Hankison, a former detective, on three counts of “wanton endangerment,” saying he had threatened three people’s lives by firing bullets that traveled through Ms. Taylor’s apartment.
Hours after that announcement, in a video livestreamed by the Louisville Metro Police Department, officers could be seen at the corner of East Broadway and South Brook Street, where they began directing traffic. Some of them form a line, holding what appear to be wooden rods.
“Stay in the line,” an officer says as the officers turn south down Brook Street, next to a Walgreens store. As the officers begin marching south, several projectiles are launched from the police line and make loud bangs as they burst in the air.
Moments later, several other bangs are heard on the video, and the officers scatter.
“Shots fired, shots fired,” the woman who is recording the livestream for the Police Department says as she runs for cover. At least a dozen officers take cover behind a police truck, and officers begin shouting “Officer down!”
“Get to cover!” another yells, as the officers retreat toward the Walgreens. “We got one down!”
The shooting came as a group of about 350 protesters began cutting through parking lots to avoid police officers who blocked their path as a 9 p.m. curfew loomed. After what sounded like gunshots rang out, the protesters split, running through nearby yards. At least one protester was shot in the neck with a projectile.
By 9 p.m., as protesters argued over where to go and how to regroup, the police began encouraging people to go home.
“You better get inside,” one officer told the group at 8:58 p.m., warning them that they only had two minutes left before the curfew was in effect. Many of the protesters began to run away from the area.
The two officers who shot Ms. Taylor were not charged.
A grand jury indicted a former Louisville police detective on Wednesday for endangering Breonna Taylor’s neighbors by recklessly firing his gun during a raid on her apartment in March. No officer was charged with killing Ms. Taylor.
The former detective, Brett Hankison, had fired into the sliding glass patio door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment building, both of which were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight. He is the only one of the three officers who fired their weapons who was dismissed from the force, with a termination letter stating that he showed “an extreme indifference to the value of human life.”
A pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child were asleep in a nearby apartment when Mr. Hankison fired his weapon; the bullets shattered a glass door but did not harm the couple and their child.
In a news conference following the announcement of the grand jury’s decision, Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, said he knew that some people would not be satisfied.
“The decision before my office is not to decide if the loss of Breonna Taylor’s life was a tragedy — the answer to that question is unequivocally yes,” Mr. Cameron said.
He later added: “If we simply act on outrage, there is no justice — mob justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice. It just becomes revenge.”
The decision came after more than 100 days of protests and a monthslong investigation into the death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot at least five times in the hallway of her apartment by officers executing a search warrant.
Because the officers did not shoot first — it was the young woman’s boyfriend who opened fire, striking one officer in the leg; he has said he mistook the police for intruders — many legal experts had thought it unlikely the officers would be indicted in her death.
Three officers fired a total of 32 shots, Mr. Cameron said. Rounds fired by Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove struck Ms. Taylor, he said, while Mr. Hankison fired 10 rounds, none of which struck Ms. Taylor.
Ms. Taylor’s name and image have become part of the national movement over racial injustice since May, when her case began to draw national attention, with celebrities writing open letters and erecting billboards that demanded the white officers be criminally charged. City and state officials feared that the grand jury’s decision not to prosecute the officers for Ms. Taylor’s death would inflame a city that has been roiled by demonstrations.
Ms. Taylor’s mother sued the city of Louisville for wrongful death and received a $12 million settlement last week. But she and her lawyers have insisted that nothing short of murder charges for all three officers would be enough, a demand taken up by thousands of protesters in Kentucky and across the country.
Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, wrote on Twitter that the failure to charge any officer for killing Ms. Taylor was “outrageous and offensive.” Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, both Democrats, called on the attorney general, a Republican, to publish as much of the evidence as possible online so that the public could review it.
Many legal experts said before the charges were announced that indictments for killing Ms. Taylor would be unlikely, given the state’s statute allowing citizens to use lethal force in self-defense. John W. Stewart, a former assistant attorney general in Kentucky, said he believed that at least Sergeant Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove were protected by that law.
“As an African-American, as someone who has been victim of police misconduct myself, getting pulled over and profiled, I know how people feel,” Mr. Stewart said. “I have been there, but I have also been a prosecutor, and emotions cannot play a part here.”
Sergeant Mattingly sent an email to officers this week saying that he and the other officers in the botched raid had done “the legal, moral and ethical thing that night.”
In Louisville, protesters were dismayed by the grand jury’s decision.
Protesters gathered in downtown Louisville shrieked in disgust after the charges in the Breonna Taylor case were announced. They were particularly upset that the only officer charged was required to post a bond of just $15,000.
After the announcement, which the protesters listened to live, people yelled “That’s it?”
Some people swore, and several people sobbed. One person called for the crowd to burn the city down. A woman sitting on a chair with a T-shirt printed with Ms. Taylor’s image had to be consoled by several people.
“It tells people, cops can kill you in the sanctity of your own home,” Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist, said as she wiped tears from her face.
Desaray Yarbrough, who lives in Louisville and came out of her house when the march came by, said the attorney general’s announcement would do nothing to quell angry demonstrators.
“It’s unjustifiable,” Ms. Yarbrough said. “The lack of charges is getting ready to bring the city down.”
A Louisville police officer was shot shortly before a 9 p.m. curfew began in the city, but no details were immediately available.
Protesters had started marching through the streets shortly after the decision was announced, as a helicopter buzzed overhead. For about 10 minutes, a group of about 150 protesters blocked an intersection just outside a barricade. Protesters argued with angry drivers, and most cars turned around.
Within minutes, more than a dozen police officers arrived, and the protesters continued down Broadway. Block by block, the police caravan followed. Some, armed with assault rifles, stood by their vehicles.
After protesters marched loudly but peacefully through the streets for more than two hours, they were stopped by a line of officers in riot gear in the Highlands section of town.
After a standoff of a few minutes, officers, seemingly without any physical provocation, began charging into protesters and forcing them back. Some used batons to push protesters. A chemical agent released by the police left a burning, peppery scent in the air.
Officers began grabbing some demonstrators and forcing them to the ground to arrest them. An officer said on a loudspeaker that the assembly had been declared unlawful and told people to disperse. Robert J. Schroeder, the interim Louisville police chief, said at a news conference just after 5 p.m. that “several” people had been arrested.
Near Jefferson Square Park, after a march around the city had returned, police arrested a handful of demonstrators. Officers their batons to push about 30 protesters closer and closer together, until people were shoulder to shoulder. After about a minute, the police opened a hole in their barricade and allowed the crowd to escape.
A local entrepreneur who goes by the name Scoota Truth, 35, joined the march through the city on Wednesday and said it was time to see real change.
”If anyone can get killed how Breonna got killed by the police, there’s no way we should live in a society where that’s possible,” he said.
‘There are Breonnas everywhere’: Protesters are gathering nationwide.
In Los Angeles, they gathered in front of the Hall of Justice. In Dallas, they gathered outside the police department headquarters. In Minnesota, they gathered at the Capitol.
In Norfolk, Va., one man held a sign that said, “There are Breonnas everywhere.”
Anger over Ms. Taylor’s killing and the prosecutors’ handling of the case has spread far from Louisville, and officials in other states had prepared for protests following the grand jury’s announcement.
Demonstrations on Wednesday night drew sizable crowds in New York, Chicago and Seattle, while some, like those in Portland, Maine, and Memphis, were small but vocal.
In Manhattan, protesters were trailed by police officers on bicycles as they marched down Broadway. In Brooklyn, thousands of people met outside of the Barclays Center and began marching in the streets.
Among the people marching was Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate. Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, wrote on Twitter that “our criminal justice system is fundamentally broken.”
In Indianapolis, protesters marching in the streets slowed traffic downtown. As they marched, protesters chanted Breonna Taylor’s name. “We’ve done this all year,” a protester told the police, The Indianapolis Star reported. “This is not new.”
In Chicago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and the city’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, called the grand jury’s decision an injustice but urged residents to keep protests peaceful.
“The grand jury’s lesser charge of a single officer does not address the loss of her life,” Mr. Pritzker said. “Not nearly. This is, to put it simply, a gross miscarriage of justice.”
Ms. Lightfoot said many mothers of children killed in gun violence in Chicago share the pain of Tamika Palmer, Ms. Taylor’s mother.
“Nothing will repair the hole in her heart for the loss of her precious child,” the mayor said. “Too many mothers in Chicago know all too well the same pain, and we extend our condolences to Ms. Palmer and her entire family.”
In St. Paul, Minn., Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer in 2016, spoke at a rally outside the Capitol.
“I feel like it was very important for me to be here today just for the matter of Breonna Taylor being a single Black woman, of African-American descent, very innocent, smart, intelligent girl, and it could’ve been me,” Ms. Reynolds said. “What if it was me? I don’t want this incident to get swept under the rug and everybody forgets about all the innocent lives that have been taken. We can never forget about any of these lives.”
A former officer was charged with ‘wanton endangerment.’ What does that mean?
The grand jury indicted Mr. Hankison for three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree,” a felony that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison for each count if he is found guilty.
Mr. Cameron, the Kentucky attorney general who will now oversee the prosecution of Mr. Hankison, said the former detective had been charged with the crimes because the grand jury believed that the shots he fired had endangered three people in an apartment next to Ms. Taylor’s.
Mr. Hankison is charged with one count for each of the apartment’s occupants: a pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child, who were asleep and who were not hit by the shots.
Under Kentucky law, a person is guilty of the crime when “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life, he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person.”
Mr. Cameron said on Wednesday that the F.B.I. was still investigating whether any of the officers committed a federal crime, such as violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights.
New details about the shooting are revealed.
Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, made public several new details about the shooting of Breonna Taylor and the ensuing investigation at his news conference on Wednesday. Here are some of the most notable:
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Breonna Taylor was hit by six shots. Her death certificate cites five shots, but Mr. Cameron said a sixth bullet or bullet fragment was found lodged in one of her feet.
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The F.B.I. laboratory in Quantico, Va., reviewed the ballistics evidence and concluded that the fatal shot was fired by Detective Cosgrove. A Kentucky lab examining the same evidence said it could not determine who had fired the fatal shot. Mr. Cameron said he could not explain the discrepancy.
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A total of 32 shots were fired by the police: 16 by Detective Cosgrove, 10 by Detective Hankison and six by Sergeant Mattingly.
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Sergeant Mattingly, who was wounded in the shooting, was hit by a 9-millimeter round fired by Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, and not by a shot fired by one of the officers, who were using .40-caliber handguns, Mr. Cameron said.
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The attorney general said the grand jury investigation confirmed that the police had properly knocked and announced their presence before bursting in to Ms. Taylor’s apartment — a point disputed by Mr. Walker and by a number of neighbors who have said in interviews with reporters that they heard no announcement.
Police officers with a ‘no-knock’ warrant broke down Ms. Taylor’s door.
The officers who broke down Ms. Taylor’s door shortly after midnight on March 13 had come with a search warrant, signed by a local magistrate. They had court approval for a “no-knock” warrant, which Louisville has since banned, but the orders were changed before the raid, requiring them to knock first and announce themselves as the police.
Mr. Walker has said that he and Ms. Taylor did not know who was at her door. Only one neighbor, out of nearly a dozen, reported hearing the officers shout “police” before entering.
The warrant for Ms. Taylor’s apartment was one of five issued in a case involving her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, who is accused of running a drug trafficking syndicate. At the other addresses that were searched, officers found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic sachet containing cocaine and fentanyl, police logs and a laboratory report show.
The surveillance leading police officers to Ms. Taylor’s home included a GPS tracker showing repeated trips by Mr. Glover to her home; photographs of him emerging from her apartment with a package in his hands; footage showing her in a car with Mr. Glover arriving at one of the trap houses he operated; and his use of her address on bank records and other documents.
The F.B.I. has opened an investigation into whether the inclusion of her name and address on the warrant violated her civil rights, as her family’s lawyers have claimed.
Ms. Taylor’s death became a Black Lives Matter rallying cry.
For months, Ms. Taylor’s death has been a rallying cry. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called out her name during the Democratic National Convention. Oprah Winfrey paid for billboards demanding the officers be charged, writing in her magazine, “We have to use whatever megaphone we can.”
Frustration has mounted in Louisville at the pace of the investigation into the fatal shooting. That frustration has been compounded by a city administration that refused to release basic records — including her autopsy and the body camera footage of officers who responded to the shooting — and that made inexplicable errors in some of the documents it did release, including a report incorrectly claiming that she had not been injured and that the door to her apartment was never breached.
Mr. Cameron, a Republican attorney general who ran on a law-and-order platform, had to navigate both the demands of protesters and the constraints of the law, said Frank Mascagni III, a former assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Louisville.
“My city is going to blow up if these three men are not charged,” said Mr. Mascagni, who believes that the officers’ actions are protected under the law. “I’m very nervous for what I think is going to occur.”
Who are the four officers involved in the Taylor case?
Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, 47, a 20-year veteran of the Louisville Metro Police Department, had spent the last four years in the narcotics division.
After officers knocked down the door to Ms. Taylor’s apartment, Sergeant Mattingly was the first officer to step inside. According to a statement he gave to investigators, he said that he saw a male and a female figure standing at the end of a hallway.
The male figure, who was Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was standing with his hands stretched out, holding a gun, Sergeant Mattingly said. “My mind’s going, this ain’t right.”
When Mr. Walker fired, Sergeant Mattingly said, he felt a sensation of heat in his leg, and then returned fire six times, stumbling over and falling. He had been hit in the femoral artery, with the bullet tearing through his thigh and exiting out the back, according to his statement.
Detective Myles Cosgrove, 42, has been with the Police Department for more than 15 years, including the last three in the narcotics division.
He was the second person inside Ms. Taylor’s apartment after an officer with a battering ram tore the door of its hinges, and fired 16 rounds down the hallway after Mr. Walker shot in the direction of the officers.
Detective Brett Hankison, 44, had been an officer with the department since 2003 and was assigned to the narcotics division. He is the only one of the three officers who opened fire that night with a history of complaints of excessive force, as well as allegations of sexual misconduct.
According to a review of his personnel file obtained by The Times, nearly all of the complaints against him were dismissed or deemed not credible. But one record in his file showed he was reprimanded at least three times, including for causing a car wreck in 2016 that fractured the spine of another officer.
During the shooting, Mr. Hankison was initially positioned behind other officers, but after Mr. Walker opened fire, he ran out of the breezeway into the parking lot and fired at least 10 rounds into the sliding-glass door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment.
He is the only one of the three officers who was fired and charged. The police chief at the time said in a public termination letter that Mr. Hankison’s actions “were a shock to the conscience,” and a violation of department policy because he fired without a line of sight, through the covered window and door, which were obscured by blinds.
Detective Joshua Jaynes, 38, has been with the Police Department since 2006, and had recently been assigned to the new Place-Based Investigations Unit, which was created in December 2019.
He prepared the five search warrant affidavits for simultaneous no-knock raids at locations suspected of playing a role in the local drug trade, including Ms. Taylor’s apartment. Lawyers for Ms. Taylor have said that the information tying her apartment to the drug trafficking syndicate was flawed and insufficient.
In the search warrant application, Detective Jaynes claimed that he had spoken to the postal inspector and had confirmed that parcels suspected of being part of the drug trade were being sent to Ms. Taylor’s apartment by an ex-boyfriend.
But Detective Jaynes did not speak directly to the postal inspector himself; he had relied on a neighboring police department to do so, because the Louisville Metro Police Department had a strained relationship with the postal inspector.
Detective Jaynes was placed on administrative reassignment in June amid the investigation into Ms. Taylor’s death, The Louisville Courier Journal reported.
Reporting was contributed by Malachy Browne, Robert Chiarito, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Derrick Bryson Taylor and Will Wright. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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