Breonna Taylor lay unresponsive for minutes before SWAT checked if she's alive in shocking raid bodycam footage
New bodycam footages have emerged into the death case of Breonna Taylor that showed shocking moments just after the March 13 fatal raid. Taylor and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker were inside their Pleasure Ridge Park apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, when cops reportedly barged in without knocking and fired multiple times, killing the 26-year-old frontline medic. The clips have reportedly emerged as part of the Louisville Metro Police Department's internal probe into the death of Taylor. One footage showed, as reported by TMZ, the African-American woman unresponsive in her hallway for several minutes before a Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) team checked her pulse and declared “she’s done”. The footage has given a detailed description of the scene just after the botched raid while showing SWAT preparing to enter the apartment. One cop was heard saying, “The female is supposedly the one that's shot" and as soon as SWAT was inside the home, cops called them to check on Taylor. But the team preferred to first clear the several parts of the apartment before checking on Taylor.
You can watch the video here.
The footage showed officers asking, “Ma'am, can you hear us?" but they received no response from Taylor, one was asked to check her pulses and said, “She’s done." After that, most of the officers of the SWAT team left the house to make way for a medic and crime scene investigators. One officer was also heard telling others not to turn off their body cameras as he examined all the casings on the floor and stated, "Is that theirs? No, that's ours, the only casings look like 9mils."
The other bodycam footage obtained by WDRB News showed a frantic moment just after the shooting where Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker was seen walking while his hands were behind his head. "Walk straight back or I'll send this dog on you! Walk back to my voice!" an officer shouted at him. The video also showed former LMPD Detective Brett Hankison instructing Walker, who asked: “What's going on?" To which Hankinson replied: "You're going to (EXPLETIVE) prison. That's what's going on!"
"What did I do?" Walker questioned and then Hankison yelled, “... for the rest of your (EXPLETIVE) life.” "What did I do? What did I do?" Walker repeated, who looked confused as he continued: “Yeah, somebody was (INAUDIBLE SOBBING) banging at the door and she said, 'Who is it?' (INAUDIBLE SOBBING), and the other started shooting.” But a cop contradicted him and said: “No, we announced three times, 'Police, search warrant.'"
You can watch the video here.
Later, the clip showed a conversation between Walker and Hankison. “There's somebody in there dead?" the former detective asked. Walker responded, “Yeah, my girlfriend. It was her house." Then Hankison questioned him, “Where is she at in the apartment?" Walker said: “She's on the ground." Hankison was also heard asking, “What kind of gun did she shoot?" to which Taylor’s boyfriend said, “It was a regular 9mm." He also insisted that she was the one who fired, but later Walker changed his statement saying he fired at the officers thinking they might be burglars.
According to reports, officers raided Taylor’s apartment while looking for her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, a suspect in drug-related crimes. They believed the young medic’s house was a “money house” where her ex "housed the dope”. In August, Glover was arrested on drug charges. A day before his arrest, Glover told a local Kentucky newspaper that his ex had nothing to do in any alleged drug trade. "The police are trying to make it out to be my fault and turning the whole community out here making it look like I brought this to Breonna's door. There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there," he stated.