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By Reuters 
2h ago
Bryan Woolston and Jonathan Allen
Louisville, Kentucky – Protests erupted in Louisville Kentucky over a grand jury ruling denounced by civil rights activists as a judicial error in the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in March.
The grand jury ruled that none of the three white officers involved in the fatal police raid on Taylor’s apartment would be directly charged with his death, although one officer was charged with endangering his neighbors.
The indictment came more than six months after Taylor, 26, a black emergency medical technician and aspiring nurse, was killed in front of her armed boyfriend after the three officers forcibly entered her home with a search warrant in a drug trafficking investigation.
His death became a symbol and his image a family spectacle during months of daily protests against racial injustice and police brutality in American cities. Last month, media mogul Oprah Winfrey featured Taylor on the cover of her magazine calling for the prosecution of the officers involved in her murder.
Following the grand jury announcement, protesters immediately took to the streets of Kentucky’s largest city and marched for hours chanting “Lives don’t matter until black lives matter,” amid sporadic clashes with police. riot gear.
The demonstrations remained mostly peaceful until several shots were heard as heavily armed police officers approached a crowd of protesters at dusk and ordered the crowd to disperse approximately half an hour before the curfew went into effect. 21:00.
A Reuters reporter at the scene heard gunfire from the crowd moments after police fired chemical irritants and “flash-bang” rounds.
Two officers were shot and wounded, Louisville Metropolitan Police Acting Chief Robert Schroeder told reporters.
A suspect was arrested and the two injured officers were in stable condition, one of them undergoing surgery, with non-life-threatening injuries, Schroeder said. He did not elaborate.
Earlier in the day, about a dozen people were arrested in a skirmish between hundreds of protesters and a group of law enforcement officers in the Highlands neighborhood, outside of downtown Louisville. Some nearby business windows were also broken. The crowd largely dissipated after the shooting Wednesday night.
Solidarity protests of various sizes were also held in several other cities on Wednesday, including New York, Washington, Atlanta and Chicago.
‘KEY WASHER’ CASE
Announcing the grand jury’s findings hours earlier, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said the panel had refused to press charges against two of the three white police officers who shot at Taylor’s apartment on March 13.
The two officers, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were found to have justification under Kentucky law for returning fire after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot them, wounding Mattingly in the thigh, he said. Cameron.
Walker has claimed that he opened fire in self-defense, believing that intruders were breaking into Taylor’s home and that they did not hear the police announce their arrival.
The third officer, former detective Brett Hankison, was charged with three counts of unjustified danger in the first degree, a crime that ranks among the lowest felony level in Kentucky and carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.
Cameron said those three charges stem from the fact that some of the blasts Hankison fired, ten in all, traveled through Taylor’s apartment to an adjacent unit where a man, a pregnant woman and a child were at home.
Cameron, however, said there was no “conclusive” evidence that any of Hankison’s bullets hit Taylor.
Six bullets hit Taylor, he said, and ballistics investigators found that only one shot, fired by Cosgrove, was fatal, Cameron said.
“There is no question that this is an emotional and heartbreaking case,” Cameron, a black Republican, said at a news conference.
Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney representing the Taylor family, denounced the outcome of the grand jury investigation and said it was “outrageous” that none of the three officers involved in the raid was criminally charged with causing the death of Taylor.
Governor Andy Beshear asked Cameron to release all evidence from the investigation to benefit the public’s understanding of the case. “Those who feel frustration, pain, deserve to know more,” he said.
Addressing a news conference in the late afternoon, Mayor Greg Fischer said the US Department of Justice was still investigating whether federal laws were violated in connection with Taylor’s death, including possible rights violations. civilians, while a broader police investigation is ongoing.
“It is clear that there are policies and procedures that need to be changed, because Breonna Taylor should still be alive,” he said. “Let’s go back to each other, not to each other, in this moment of opportunity.”
The police chief fired Hankison in June, concluding that he had “shown extreme disregard for the value of human life” when he “fired mindlessly and blindly” at Taylor’s home. Mattingly and Cosgrove were reassigned to administrative duties.
Louisville agreed to pay $ 12 million to Taylor’s family to settle a wrongful death lawsuit, Mayor Fischer announced earlier this month. He said the agreement was intended to “begin the healing process.”
President Donald Trump said on Twitter that he was praying for the two officers shot Wednesday and had spoken with the Kentucky governor to offer federal assistance.
His Democratic rival in the presidential race, Joe Biden, said the grand jury did not do justice to Taylor, but he was hopeful that the federal investigation into his death would do just that.
“We do not need to wait for the final judgment of that investigation to do more to bring justice to Breonna,” he added.
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