Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend recounts her shooting by police
This undated photo provided by Taylor family attorney Sam Aguiar shows Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. Three months after plainclothes detectives serving a warrant busted into Tylor's apartment on March 13, 2020, and shot the 26-year-old Black woman to death, only one of the three officers who opened fire has lost his job. Calls for action against the officers have gotten louder during a national reckoning over racism and police brutality following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis.[AP/ Taylor family attorney Sam Aguiar]
The boyfriend of Breonna Taylor said the hail of bullets coming at them from police the night she was killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment sounded like a war.
Kenneth Walker said he tried to pull Taylor down to the floor amid the gunfire but "she was just scared, she didn’t get down."
"I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many gunshots like all at the same time," Walker told "CBS This Morning" in his first televised interview since the shooting. "I’ve never been to war but I assume that’s what war probably sounds like."
He said the loss of Taylor, an emergency medical worker, is especially hard because she "took care of a lot of people."
"There’s a lot of people who need her bad right now, including me," Walker said in the interview, which aired Wednesday.
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They were in bed watching a movie early on March 13 when police serving a narcotics warrant knocked down the door. Walker told investigators he heard loud knocking, but didn’t hear police identify themselves, so he thought it was an intruder.
"I’m a million percent sure that nobody identified themselves," Walker said in the CBS interview. "That’s why I grabbed the gun. Didn’t have a clue" they were police, he said.
Walker fired a single shot toward the door, striking a police officer in the leg. That officer and two others returned 32 shots. Taylor was hit five times and died at the scene. Walker wasn’t hurt, but he was initially arrested for attempted murder of a police officer. That charge was dropped in May.
Last month, a grand jury in Louisville declined to charge any of the officers in Taylor’s death. One officer was charged with wanton endangerment for firing bullets that went through Taylor’s apartment and penetrated a neighbor’s home.