Why the Breonna Taylor case has stalled.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, Breonna Taylor and Kenneth Walker were in bed when police began pounding on the door of their Louisville, Kentucky apartment. Walker thought someone was coming in, so he got up and grabbed a gun to protect himself and his girlfriend. Louisville subway police smashed down the door with a battering ram and Walker fired, injuring the sergeant. Jonathan Mattingly. Police responded, hitting Taylor multiple times. She died on the scene.

In the four months after Breonna Taylor’s death, her name has become a rallying cry in national protests against police brutality. But still, no criminal charges have been filed for her murder. In the Thursday episode of What Next, I spoke to Tessa Duvall, a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal, about why the case has stalled. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tessa Duvall: Immediately after the Breonna Taylor shooting, the police department held a press conference, which is fairly standard, saying it was an officer who had been shot in an attempt to deliver a search warrant. It was a very short press conference, maybe seven or eight minutes, and it really came [as] A story about an officer’s injury and well-being.

Mary Harris: When did your understanding of what happened that night begin to change?

It really took a couple of months for people to start researching and seeing that this was perhaps more complicated than they had originally led us to believe.

There were photos of Breonna Taylor’s apartment that were released by attorneys for her family, and only the variety of household items that had bullets: pots and pans, a watch, a toolbox. There were holes in the bathroom, in the windows. The sliding glass patio door was shattered. There were bullet holes through the curtains that covered the patio door. There were bullet holes in the hallway, and there was blood everywhere. Those were some of the first glimpses of how chaotic and violent this meeting was.

“People really want positions and will not settle for anything Less.”

– Tessa Duvall, reporter for the Courier Journal

These photos were released just days before George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. His death increased pressure on the Louisville police. The boss was finally fired. Do not touch orders were prohibited in the city. And one of the officers involved in Breonna’s death, Brett Hankison, was fired. But the protests continued.

What protesters in Louisville want is criminal charges. That is the ultimate goal for this. Banning no hit orders, in his opinion, is great. First of all, one should never have been used in the case of Breonna Taylor, is what many would say. Therefore, they see the ban on do not touch orders as an important step, but that is not the solution. People really want charges, and they won’t settle for anything less than the charges brought against those officers. And the longer it takes, the more frustration increases.

In the weeks after Breonna Taylor’s death, the police department began investigating itself. And last month they released an incident report on the night of Breonna’s death. Can you characterize that a bit?

So we have received very few documents from the Louisville Metro Police about what happened the night Breonna died, but one of the documents they finally released was the initial report of the incident, which was useless. It contained absolutely no useful information. It had her name. She was her age, I think. She lists the situation as a death investigation with the police involved, but then also marked “no” under forced entry, despite police admitting that they used a battering ram to enter her apartment. Beneath the injuries was “none,” which, we knew was dead. So obviously there were injuries. We also know that an officer was injured in this incident. Therefore, it was not only very redacted, it was full of inaccuracies. The irony is that the police resisted releasing this, for what reason, I don’t know, because, as I said, it wasn’t helpful.

Who is investigating what happened that night now?

The police then investigated this case through its Public Integrity Unit, and the findings of that investigation were released to the state attorney general’s office. Daniel Cameron is the attorney general in Kentucky, and his office has had that file for a couple of months. The reason it is in his hands is because he is a special prosecutor in this case. The local community attorney, who would typically handle a case like this, recused himself, citing a conflict of interest because he was currently prosecuting the attempted murder charges against Kenny Walker. Those have been fired ever since.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron has said he does not have a timeline for this, that it is an ongoing investigation and that we will all get these results when we get them and not a moment before I am ready to deliver them.

So now that so many months have passed and there have been protests every day, where are the protests focused?

Right now it seems like the main focus is to make sure Breonna Taylor isn’t forgotten. It’s almost as if the protesters send the message, We have not forgotten his name. We have also not forgotten the names of those officers. We know that two of them are still on the payroll, and we know that no charges have been filed.

We saw last week that 87 protesters were arrested at the home of Attorney General Daniel Cameron. They were originally charged with serious crimes for trying to intimidate the participant in a legal process, and eventually the felony charges were dismissed, but protesters are willing to go to jail and escalate and maintain pressure as much as possible. So they are not satisfied right now. And that is the message they are sending by appearing every day.

Other cities seem to have acted faster, whether you look at Atlanta and the death of Rayshard Brooks or Minneapolis and what happened there. What do you think is the difference in Louisville? Why is it moving at a different rate?

If you asked the mayor, he would blame the lack of body camera images: since there are no images, things can be open to interpretation. When people saw that video of what happened to George Floyd, he was immediately denounced by police officers across the country who said, “This is not what the police look like.” With Breonna Taylor, people can choose. One of the most common things I hear is, well, Kenny Walker shot the police officers, and therefore that justifies what happened next. Or that if Breonna had not been involved with Jamarcus Glover [an ex-boyfriend who was suspected in a narcotics investigation], then she would never have been in the search warrant. So there are people who will certainly try to justify what happened through things like that.

Who is telling you that?

That doesn’t necessarily come from someone in a position of authority, but it comes from people I hear from, readers, and because this is such a national story, I hear from people all over the place that if Kenny Walker had never shot, then she still would be alive. Or if she wasn’t connected to this drug dealer, then she would still be alive. Obviously, there are people who can do mental gymnastics to justify almost anything. But I think from a more official perspective, it’s almost as if this case was a “he said, she said”. What Kenny Walker heard and saw on one side of the door is his perspective, and what the officers say they did on the other side of the door is his set of facts, and how does he rectify these two and bring out what really happened?

But you say that part of the reason why the record of Breonna Taylor’s death seems incomplete is because one side remains silent.

There’s still a lot we don’t know from the officers’ perspective. We have heard the full interview with Kenny Walker at this point, Breonna Taylor’s family attorneys have expressed a lot about what they feel happened, but the police have been very quiet about all of this. So we haven’t seen things like ballistics reports. We don’t know who fired the shots that were ultimately fatal. We have only heard from one of the three officers involved in the shooting, but we know that there were many more at the scene. And all of those things provide a really important context to what happened that night.

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