What to Know About Breonna Taylor’s Death
Her killing by the police in Louisville, Ky., led to federal and state charges against officers. But one trial ended in acquittal, another in a hung jury, and a judge has dismissed some charges.
The death of
Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Ky., in March 2020 during a botched raid on her apartment, was one of the main drivers of wide-scale demonstrations that erupted that year over policing and racial injustice in the United States.
No officer has ever been charged with shooting Ms. Taylor, but on Aug. 4, 2022, the
Justice Department charged four current and former police officers with federal civil rights violations, including lying to obtain a search warrant for her apartment. A judge dismissed some of those charges on Aug. 23, 2024.
Within a few weeks of being charged, one of the four officers — Kelly Goodlett, a detective — retired from the Louisville Police Department and
pleaded guilty at a hearing, and another, Kyle Meany, was fired by the department.
A third officer facing the federal charges, Brett Hankison, was the only officer to also face state criminal charges in connection with the raid. He was accused of
endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing 10 bullets through a covered window and sliding glass door, some of which passed through Ms. Taylor’s apartment and into a neighboring one where a family was sleeping. A state jury
found him not guilty in March 2022.
Mr. Hankison was tried in federal court in November 2023 on charges of violating the rights of Ms. Taylor and her neighbors with his shooting, but the
jury deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial. The case is scheduled to be retried in October.
A
New York Times examination of video footage from the scene, witness accounts, statements by the police officers and forensics reports showed that the raid was compromised by poor planning and reckless execution. It found that the only support for a grand jury’s conclusion that the officers had announced themselves before bursting into Ms. Taylor’s apartment — beyond the assertions of the officers themselves — was the account of a single witness who had given inconsistent statements.
Ms. Taylor’s family has long pleaded for justice, and her case began to draw national attention
in May 2020. Later that year, Louisville officials
agreed to pay $12 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Ms. Taylor’s mother and to change police practices to try to prevent officer-caused deaths. In December 2022, a lawyer for Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said that the city of Louisville had
agreed to pay $2 million to settle lawsuits brought by Mr. Walker.
Following national demonstrations in 2020 over police brutality and systemic racism, Louisville officials banned the use of no-knock warrants, which allow the police to forcibly enter people’s homes to search them without warning, and
fired several officers, including Mr. Hankison, who was found to have shown “an extreme indifference to the value of human life.”
