Breonna Taylor was alive for 5 minutes after being shot but officers didn't get medical help, claims boyfriend
Breonna Taylor was alive for five minutes after police shot her on March 13, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker has claimed. According to police records, officers at the scene made no efforts to save her. Louisville Metro Police Department officers shot the 26-year-old emergency medical technician to death after knocking down her apartment door with a battering ram on a no-knock search warrant. Two suspected drug dealers the police were in pursuit of weren't in her apartment at the time.
Speaking to the New York Times, a Jefferson County coroner said Taylor couldn't have been saved and had likely died within a minute of being shot. However, Walker claims his girlfriend continued to cough and sputter as he spoke to her parents over the phone shortly after the shooting. "(Police are) yelling like, 'Come out, come out,' and I'm on the phone with her (mom). I'm still yelling help because she's over here coughing and, like, I'm just freaking out," Walker told police during interrogation three hours after the incident.
"Breonna, who was unarmed in her hallway, was struck by several rounds of gunfire. She was not killed immediately," Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker, two attorneys representing Taylor's family, wrote in a revised lawsuit filing. "Rather, she lived for another five to six minutes before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on the floor of her home."
According to The Courier-Journal, police dispatch logs indicate that officers at the scene neither sought nor rendered medical attention to the victim. Instead, they reportedly waited for Walker to exit and treated Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, who was injured when Walker opened fire at the police after mistaking them for intruders. "This is a tragedy all around," Mayor Greg Fischer said. "You have an LMPD officer shot. His fellow officers rush to save him, not knowing if they will be shot at if they try to go inside, and not knowing that anyone inside has been hit. It is just a horrible tragedy that should never happen again."
Speaking to the New York Times, Jefferson County Coroner Barbara Weakley-Jones said the deputy who filled out Taylor's death certificate was still undergoing training in reading autopsies. She added that Taylor's injuries were not survivable.
"If she had even been outside of an emergency room department at a hospital, and she got shot and sustained the same injury, they would not have been able to save her," Weakley-Jones told the paper. "…So there's no way that even if they (police) ran to her and tried to give her aid, they can't do anything because it's all internal injuries that you can't stop."
Daniel Cameron, the state attorney general, is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate Taylor's shooting. However, neither has pressed criminal charges against Mattingly and Detectives Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, the three cops involved in the shooting.
Nonetheless, the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) delivered a letter on June 19 relieving Hankison of his duties. Police Chief Robert Schroeder called Hankison's actions "a shock to the conscience" and said they represented "extreme violations" of LMPD's regulations regarding the use of deadly force.