Killing of Breonna Taylor

Based on Wikipedia: Killing of Breonna Taylor

On the night of March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was asleep in her Louisville apartment when someone started banging on her door. It was shortly after midnight. She had worked a full shift at the hospital that day—she was an emergency room technician at University of Louisville Health—and she was lying in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Neither of them had any idea that seven police officers were standing outside in the hallway, dressed in plain clothes, carrying a battering ram.

What happened next would become one of the defining tragedies of American policing, a case that would ignite protests across the country, expose the dangers of how search warrants are obtained and executed, and leave a twenty-six-year-old woman dead in her own hallway.

A Warrant Built on a Lie

To understand how Breonna Taylor died, you have to understand how police came to be at her door in the first place.

The Louisville Metro Police Department was investigating a suspected drug trafficking operation run out of a house about ten miles from Taylor's apartment. The primary targets were two men named Jamarcus Glover and Adrian Walker—no relation to Kenneth Walker, Breonna's boyfriend. Glover had been in an on-and-off relationship with Taylor that ended in February 2020, about a month before the raid.

Detective Joshua Jaynes wanted a search warrant for Taylor's apartment. His reasoning was thin: Glover had used Taylor's address for some mail, and her car had been seen parked at his house. But to get the warrant, Jaynes needed more. So he wrote something in his affidavit that wasn't true.

He claimed he had "verified through a US Postal Inspector" that Glover had been receiving packages at Taylor's apartment. This was the key piece of evidence suggesting drugs might be present at her home.

There was just one problem. The postal inspector had never said any such thing.

When the US postal inspector in Louisville was later asked about this, the office publicly announced that no such collaboration with law enforcement had ever occurred. In fact, when asked by another agency to monitor packages going to Taylor's apartment, the postal service had done exactly that—and concluded there were no packages of interest going there at all.

The warrant was a house of cards built on a fabrication.

Twelve Minutes, Five Warrants

On March 12, 2020, the day before the raid, Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw approved five search warrants in twelve minutes. All five contained nearly identical boilerplate language justifying no-knock entry—the kind of warrant that allows police to break down your door without announcing themselves first.

No-knock warrants exist for specific situations. If police have reason to believe evidence will be destroyed—drugs flushed down a toilet, for instance—or if there's surveillance equipment that might alert suspects, courts will sometimes allow officers to enter without warning. But legal scholars who reviewed the Taylor warrant were skeptical it met that standard.

"A no-knock warrant would be improper" unless police had reason to suspect surveillance cameras at Taylor's residence, said Christopher Slobogin, director of Vanderbilt University's Criminal Justice Program. Another professor, Brian Gallini at the University of Arkansas, put it more bluntly: if this warrant was appropriate, "then every routine drug transaction would justify grounds for no-knock."

Why did Judge Shaw approve these warrants so quickly? According to Kelly Goodlett, a detective who later pleaded guilty to lying on the warrant, Detective Jaynes specifically sought out Judge Shaw "because he believed she would not closely scrutinize the warrants."

He was right. She didn't.

What Happened at the Door

Somewhere between when the warrant was approved and when police arrived at Taylor's apartment, orders changed. The no-knock warrant was converted to a "knock and announce" warrant, meaning officers were supposed to identify themselves before entering.

What happened next depends entirely on who you ask.

The officers say they knocked and announced themselves multiple times. Kenneth Walker says he and Breonna heard a loud bang and Breonna called out "Who is it?" several times. No answer came. Growing alarmed, Walker called his mother. Then he called 911. Then he armed himself.

The New York Times interviewed roughly a dozen neighbors. Only one heard the officers shout "Police!"—a single time. That neighbor was on the exterior staircase directly above Taylor's apartment. Everyone else heard nothing. One neighbor was outside smoking a cigarette at the time. He heard no announcement.

The story of that one witness who heard "Police!" became complicated. His lawyer later said police had quoted him out of context, that they announced themselves "only in passing." And according to VICE News, when police first interviewed this witness a week after the shooting, he originally told them "nobody identified themselves." It was only two months later, when police called him again, that his story changed to say he'd heard "This is the cops."

Kenneth Walker has never wavered. He says he thought intruders were breaking in.

Thirty-Two Shots

When police broke through the door with their battering ram, Kenneth Walker fired his gun once toward the floor. He has described it as a warning shot. It struck Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly in the leg.

The officers returned fire. Thirty-two shots.

Breonna Taylor was hit six times. She died in her hallway.

Kenneth Walker was unharmed. He was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder of a police officer. Those charges would eventually be dismissed with prejudice—meaning they can never be brought again.

One of the three officers who fired that night, Brett Hankison, did something that would later lead to his termination and eventual conviction. Instead of firing toward the front door where the shot had come from, he moved to the side of the apartment and fired ten bullets through a covered window and glass door. His shots passed through Taylor's apartment and into the neighboring unit, where a pregnant woman, her partner, and their five-year-old child were sleeping.

None of Hankison's bullets hit Breonna Taylor. The fatal shot came from officer Myles Cosgrove. But Hankison's reckless firing—what prosecutors called "blindly" shooting through covered glass—endangered neighbors who had nothing to do with any of it.

A curious detail emerged during the investigation. Taylor's apartment was never searched. Police broke down her door, fired thirty-two rounds, killed a woman in her own home—and then never conducted the search that was supposedly the entire reason for being there.

The Question of Friendly Fire

Kenneth Walker's legal team raised a troubling possibility. They pointed out that forensic photography showed no blood in the part of the apartment where Sergeant Mattingly claimed to have been shot. The single bullet from Walker's gun—a hollow-point round—showed no blood on it when photographed by the court. Pathologists consulted by the defense team believed a hollow-point bullet would have done "considerably" more damage to Mattingly's thigh than his wound showed.

The implication was startling: what if Mattingly had been shot not by Kenneth Walker, but by his fellow officers in the chaos of return fire?

A Kentucky State Police ballistics report was inconclusive. Due to "limited markings of comparative value," investigators could not definitively say whether the bullet that hit Mattingly came from Walker's gun or someone else's.

The question was never resolved.

Justice Delayed, Justice Denied

In September 2020, the city of Louisville agreed to pay Taylor's family twelve million dollars—the largest settlement in the city's history for a police misconduct case. The settlement also included promises to reform police practices.

But money is not justice. And what happened in court would only deepen the wound.

Later that month, a state grand jury indicted Brett Hankison on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment—not for shooting Breonna Taylor, but for endangering her neighbors with his wild shots through the covered window. The other officers faced no state charges at all.

The prosecutors' reasoning was straightforward and, to many, infuriating: because Kenneth Walker fired first, the officers' use of force was legally justified. Under Kentucky's self-defense laws, the officers had the right to shoot back.

What this logic seemed to ignore was that Kenneth Walker was also exercising his right to self-defense. He was a lawful gun owner who believed intruders were breaking into his home in the middle of the night. If the officers failed to properly announce themselves—and the evidence suggested they either didn't announce at all or did so inadequately—then Walker was legally justified in firing his warning shot.

Two people, each believing they were defending themselves from an attack. Only one of them survived.

When grand jury recordings were released, two jurors came forward with a bombshell accusation. They said the grand jury was never even presented with the option of charging the officers with homicide. The prosecutor, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, had apparently decided on his own that such charges weren't warranted—and didn't let the grand jury make that determination themselves.

Several jurors accused Cameron and the police of covering up what actually happened.

The Federal Case

In August 2022, the Department of Justice announced federal civil rights charges against Hankison for the unconstitutional use of excessive force. His first federal trial ended in a mistrial in November 2023. But in October 2024, a second jury found him guilty of depriving Breonna Taylor of her civil rights through excessive force.

In July 2025, Hankison was sentenced to two and three-quarter years in federal prison, plus three years of supervised release.

Federal prosecutors also charged three officers who weren't even present at the shooting—Kyle Meany, Joshua Jaynes, and Kelly Goodlett—with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and civil rights violations. The charge was that they had conspired to mislead the judge who approved the search warrant, then worked to cover it up afterward.

Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty. She admitted to lying on the warrant and writing a false report to hide what they'd done. As of early 2025, she awaits sentencing.

Joshua Jaynes—the detective who lied on the warrant application claiming postal inspector verification that never existed—pleaded not guilty. So did Kyle Meany.

In August 2024, a federal judge made a decision that stunned many observers. Judge Charles Simpson dismissed the most serious civil rights charges against Jaynes and Meany, reducing them to misdemeanors. His reasoning? Kenneth Walker's actions had "disrupted" the officers' execution of the warrant. Walker firing his gun, the judge wrote, had led to police shooting back. Therefore, Walker's actions—not the fraudulent warrant—had resulted in Taylor's death.

By this logic, the victim's boyfriend defending his home against what he reasonably believed were intruders was more responsible for Breonna Taylor's death than the police officer who lied to get the warrant in the first place.

Who Was Breonna Taylor?

It's worth pausing here to remember that Breonna Taylor was a person, not just a name on a hashtag.

She was twenty-six years old. She worked full-time as an emergency room technician at University of Louisville Health and had previously worked as an emergency medical technician—the person who shows up in an ambulance when you call 911. She saved lives for a living.

Her funeral was held on March 21, 2020, eight days after she was killed. The world was just beginning to shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Her death might have gone unnoticed, one more Black woman killed by police in a country where such deaths happen with numbing regularity.

Instead, her name became a rallying cry.

Say Her Name

The killing of Breonna Taylor, combined with the lack of initial charges against the officers, sparked protests across the United States. Demonstrators adopted the hashtag #SayHerName, a phrase originally created to highlight police violence against Black women, who often receive less attention than Black men killed by police.

These protests became part of the broader wave of civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months later. But Taylor's case highlighted something specific about how police abuse of power can extend far beyond the moment of violence. The lies on the warrant. The rubber-stamp judge. The prosecutors who wouldn't let a grand jury consider homicide charges. The federal judge who blamed the boyfriend.

Every step of the system that was supposed to provide justice instead seemed to protect the officers who killed her.

The Cast of Characters

The story of Breonna Taylor's death involves a constellation of people whose decisions led to that night and shaped what came after.

Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly was the officer shot in the leg. He joined the Louisville Metro Police Department in 2000, became a sergeant in 2009, and joined the narcotics division in 2016. He has since retired.

Myles Cosgrove was the officer who fired the fatal shot. He was transferred to the narcotics division in 2016 and was eventually fired by the LMPD in 2021.

Brett Hankison, who fired blindly through the covered window, joined the LMPD in 2003 after three years with the Lexington Police Department. He was fired in June 2020 for his conduct during the raid and is now a convicted felon serving federal prison time.

Judge Mary Shaw approved the warrant in under three minutes as part of a batch of five warrants she signed off on in twelve minutes total. In 2022, she lost her reelection bid and announced her retirement.

Joshua Jaynes, the detective who lied on the warrant application, was reassigned in June 2020 and later faced federal charges.

Kelly Goodlett, another detective involved in writing the warrant, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges for her role in the cover-up.

And Jamarcus Glover, the man police were actually looking for? He was never at Taylor's apartment that night. He was in custody on unrelated charges. In multiple recorded conversations and interviews, he has repeatedly said that Taylor had no involvement in any drug operations and that police had "no business" looking for him at her residence. Taylor was never charged with any crime. She was never even a co-defendant in Glover's case.

She was simply, to the police, an address on a warrant.

What We're Left With

Five years after Breonna Taylor's death, some measure of accountability has been achieved. One officer is in federal prison. Others have been fired or forced to resign. The city paid twelve million dollars to her family. Reforms were promised.

But the fundamental question lingers: how does a system allow police to obtain a warrant based on a lie, execute that warrant so poorly that a young woman dies in her hallway, and then spend years finding reasons why no one should be held responsible?

Kenneth Walker fired one shot at what he believed were home invaders. Police fired thirty-two shots back. A woman is dead. And a federal judge determined that Walker's single warning shot was more responsible for her death than the officers who riddled her body with bullets.

Breonna Taylor was twenty-six years old. She worked in an emergency room, helping people on the worst days of their lives. She went to sleep in her own bed on March 13, 2020, and never woke up.

The hashtag demands that we say her name. The harder demand is to ask why we keep having to say so many names at all.