Grand jury tapes show officers' accounts of Breonna Taylor shooting

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A neighbor said it sounded like a gunfight at the “OK Corral.” An officer said he believed police walked into an ambush. One detective said he couldn’t tell who was shooting.

Police interviews and other evidence presented to a grand jury last week and made public Friday show how a narcotics raid with little perceived risk went awry earlier this year. In a matter of minutes, Breonna Taylor — a 26-year-old emergency room tech labeled a “soft target” by police — lay dying in her hallway.

The interviews were included in about 15 hours of recordings released Friday morning by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office, which complied with Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Bailey Smith’s order to do so.

The tapes shed additional light on the events that unfolded shortly before 1 a.m. March 13 at Taylor’s Springfield Drive home, where police shot and killed Taylor while executing a warrant as part of a drug investigation.

Officers repeatedly say they knocked on Taylor’s door and identified themselves as police, according to interviews the grand jury heard, taking up to two minutes to make their presence known — even as more neighbors than not dispute how clear their announcement was.

And the evidence presented by Cameron’s office supports police’s claim that they believe Taylor’s apartment was connected to suspected drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, whom she had previously dated. Police were operating “in good faith” when they served the warrant, an attorney general’s investigator told jurors.

“There’s other issues related to the warrant that we’re not getting into too much in here,” investigator Jeff Fogg said. “But the officers were executing a valid search warrant.”

The newly released audio also fails to address some significant questions, while at the same time raising new ones.

The attorney general’s office did not include the recommendations its special prosecutors made to the 12-member grand jury that met Sept. 21-23. As a result, it’s not known how prosecutors guided — or didn’t guide — the jurors.

“As is customary in the recording of Grand Jury proceedings, juror deliberations and prosecutor recommendations and statements were not recorded, as they are not evidence,” Cameron’s office said in a news release.

Cameron said in a statement that while it’s unusual for a judge to require that grand jury recordings be released, his staff complied with Bailey Smith’s order “so that the full truth can be heard.”

It couldn’t always be heard, however.

At times, the audio of the jury proceedings is inaudible. Prosecutors played tape recordings of internal police investigations to the jury, with some parts unclear. And jurors’ follow-up questions weren’t always loud enough to understand.

“We have serious concerns over how the law was explained to the grand jury,” said Sam Aguiar, an attorney for Taylor’s family. “Were they advised that self-defense does not apply to initial aggressors? Were they advised that self-defense cannot be raised for wanton or reckless conduct injuring an unarmed third party?

“Hell, were they even advised that the prosecutor was required to draft indictments for them for charges them for which they determined probable cause existed?”

Cameron has said that two officers — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove — were justified in the shooting because they were fired upon first.

The grand jury last week indicted former Det. Brett Hankison on three counts of wanton endangerment for firing into an apartment near Taylor’s. Three people were home at the time.

For the first time, the grand jury evidence provides Hankison’s account of the raid.

He told police investigators March 23 that as officers burst into Taylor’s apartment, he saw someone inside holding a gun he was “certain” was an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Then, after an officer was shot, Hankison moved around a corner and away from the front door. He believed his colleagues were getting “sprayed by bullets” or being shot at from inside.

Hankison then fired multiple bullets in the direction of the apartment where he had last seen “the threat,” aiming toward a hallway through sliding glass doors and a window.

“I thought they were just being executed,” he told police investigators 10 days after the March 13 raid.

Det. Mike Nobles told investigators he didn’t know who was shooting. “I thought somebody was inside just letting them have it though the door.”

But Cameron found that Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, fired a single shot from a 9mm pistol. It was the only shot he fired, according to Walker’s own statement and Cameron’s conclusions.

DID POLICE ANNOUNCE THEIR PRESENCE?

Among the disputed questions from the March raid had been whether police adequately identified themselves before breaking down Taylor’s door with a battering ram. There is no body camera footage of officers’ actions; the grand jury was told that one officer thought he activated his body cam but that it didn’t work. Other officers involved in the raid were not wearing body cams.

At least four of Taylor’s neighbors told investigators they did not hear police knock or announce before bursting into her apartment. Cody Etherton and Chelsea Napper, who lived directly next door, told a Cameron investigator that they never heard police before they heard Taylor’s door being broken down, followed by gunfire.

"The noise happened all at once, she jumped from the bed and said it was like Fort Knox," investigator Herman Hall said of his interview with Napper.

Etherton told investigators that as he got up from bed “it sounded as if someone was trying to kick in” the front door. Etherton also recalled “drywall dust” exploding in his apartment's hallway.

Another neighbor, whose front door is near Taylor's, told investigators she also did not hear police until she heard a loud bang. She said she opened her front door and heard an officer say, “Reload, reload, let's do what we need to do.”

Only one witness said he heard police announce themselves before the shooting began, Cameron’s prosecutors told the jury. Cameron singled out that witness in a press conference last week, saying he “corroborated” officers’ accounts.

But the man, who used a babysitter who lives above Taylor’s first-floor apartment, had previously recalled a different story.

On March 21, more than a week after the shooting, the man told police he heard no one identify themselves as officers and heard no knocking.

On May 15, in a subsequent interview, he changed his story and said he did hear police announce themselves and knock on Taylor's door.

An investigator with Cameron’s office told grand jurors that that there is a “language barrier” with the man, and “it's kind of hard to understand him.”

A recording of the interview with the man was not played for the grand jury in the tapes released Friday.

In a third interview with man, Cameron’s investigators say he said he heard police announce themselves but he did not hear police knock on the door.

WHY TAYLOR’S APARTMENT WAS TARGETED

Police sought a warrant for Taylor’s home because they believed the main target of a broader drug investigation, Jamarcus Glover, was keeping drugs and/or money at her apartment.

Glover had dated Taylor previously and had remained in contact with her as recently as the day before the raid, when he texted her, according to jail calls in court records. Records show her car had been spotted on a police “pole cam” outside a suspected drug house on Elliott Avenue – one of the targets of the raids on March 13.

But Glover had not seen her in months before her death, he said in one call, and repeatedly questioned why police would raid her home. In one recorded jail call, he said officers "didn’t have no business looking for me at no Bre house.

"At the end of the day, I know she didn’t ... I know she didn’t to deserve none of this sh**, though," he said.

Glover did say, while trying to find enough money to post bond, that Taylor was "hanging onto my money" for him, according to the phone calls obtained by WDRB News.

Police were told Glover had packages sent to Taylor's home, Mattingly told an internal investigator.

"She receives his packages and held his money," Mattingly said.

But Louisville police were repeatedly told there were no packages, "suspicious or otherwise," delivered to Taylor's home in connection to the drug investigation, according to testimony in an internal LMPD report.

Officers asked two members of the Shively Police Department to check with a postal inspector and were told there were no packages being sent to Taylor’s home.

In a May 18 interview with the department’s Public Integrity Unit, Shively police Sgt. Timothy Salyer said that sometime after Taylor's shooting — and after he read the warrant affidavit — he asked Mattingly about the affidavit.

“Sgt. Mattingly stated he told Detective Jaynes there was no package history at that address,” Salyer told investigators, according to a summary of the interview.

"SOFT TARGET"

Cosgrove, who Cameron said fired the bullet that killed Taylor, testified in an internal investigation that Taylor was a "soft target" and officers were asked to "please knock and announce and to use our maturity as investigators to get into this house."

In his interview, which was played for the grand jury, Cosgrove said that while officers had a no-knock warrant for Taylor's home, they were urged in a briefing "not to hit the door."

As they are outside of Taylor's apartment, Cosgrove said Hankison was "challenging a male individual who is standing in open door"

The man, a neighbor of Taylor's told police to leave her alone, Cosgrove said.

Officers knocked on Taylor's door and announced that they were police, he told investigators. When there was no answer after about two minutes, Cosgrove said the order was given to knock the door in.

Cosgrove testified that he doesn't recall many details of the shooting, describing himself as being disoriented. He said he saw "this shadowy figure" and had tunnel vision.

The officer said he saw "vivid white flashes," which he believed was gunfire, when Mattingly was shot.

"I did not have any hand sensation or any recollection that, that, I'm firing a gun, he told investigators. "If you told me I didn't fire a gun I'd be like 'OK, I believe you.'"

Cosgrove fired 16 times into Taylor’s apartment, according to Cameron’s investigation.

Cosgrove said he had difficulty remembering how many shots he fired, though he thought it to be a “low amount” of rounds.

“I am not going to put a number out there,” Cosgrove said in the interview, referring to the number of shots he fired. “We are taught to neutralize the threat appropriately.”

Grand jurors asked Fogg, the investigator with Cameron’s office who led them through Cosgrove’s testimony, whether it would be unusual for a police officer who discharged his or her weapon not to remember how many shots were fired.

Fogg said he has interviewed a lot of people who have fired weapons in his career.

“Sometimes they’re just playing or trying to be evasive. Sometimes they’re being (telling) the truth. And it’s difficult to tell,” he said. “I will say, it’s not uncommon for people to experience that. It’s definitely not uncommon to say, from my past, if someone shot another human being four or five times, or even more, that they may think they just shot once. So that’s common.”

Cosgrove said after firing into the apartment, he retreated to the parking and described seeing a flash of light to his left.

A grand juror noted that flash would be consistent with Hankison’s position firing from outside the apartment, but Fogg said they couldn’t say for sure.

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