COMPOUNDING THE TAYLOR TRAGEDY

I can't stop reading and hearing a range of reporters and podcasters on CBC and elsewhere repeat a blatantly false story across all their platforms. This has been going on for months now with no corrections or retractions. It's a similar fiction to what I got through social media before their own reporting began. The story I originally learned was that this nurse was asleep in her bed when cops, in the wrong place at the wrong time, broke down her door and shot her dead during their botched drug raid.

(Would it surprise you to learn that none of that happened? Before you learn more, with the introduction below or by seeking more reputable sources elsewhere, I encourage you to give some serious thought to what it would mean for you and for the state of our institutions and the world if none of the above is factual...)

When I first went looking for more information, there was a ton of conflicting and confused messaging. That's fairly typical in the 21st century. What was certain, at the very least, was that – contrary to what almost everyone offering commentary and nearly every news report, write-up, and podcast on the topic – Breonna Taylor was not “shot dead while asleep in her bed.” What I learned and was fairly sure of was that the public record states, and by all accounts, she was neither asleep nor in her bed when killed by police. She wasn't even in her bedroom. This may seem trivial but so much of the emotional force behind this story was turned on this very messaging. Her death at the hands of police was particularly disgusting because she wasn't even conscious and that we now have examples of cops gunning people down in their sleep. So, being asleep in one’s bed versus being conscious and in the hallway felt to me to be different enough versions of events (in fact, feeling, and all likely repercussions) that I wondered what else CBC and seemingly everyone else might be getting wrong on this story.

When I went looking for a second time, now months later, I found that, according to recently released files, Breonna Taylor’s name came up in the drug case which had resulted in the warrant being executed on her residence the night she was killed by police. So, already this version of events was not nearly as random and Taylor not as distant a figure as the impression I (and seemingly the world) had been given. As it turns out, Taylor had posted bail for her ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, and another suspect, Darreal Forest, several times between 2017 to 2020. In this way, Taylor appeared to the police to be very much involved in facilitating not just her partner’s drug business, which I assume is pretty normal, but that of his associates, which definitely feels far less bystander-like. All of this was interesting but not the entire picture.

Further still, it appears that when interrogated by police, Jamarcus Glover told them that he and Taylor had not “been around each other in over two months”. What Glover didn't know when he said this to police was that they had recent footage, from February 13th, just a month before Taylor was killed, showing the two of them arriving at and then leaving a residence together in the same car. Additionally, according to court documents, there's a recording of a conversation from the morning of March 13th, just hours after Taylor was killed, in which Glover told his partner that Taylor is the one who moves his money. "Bre got down like $15 [thousand], she had the $8 [thousand] I gave her the other day and she picked up another $6 [thousand]," he says. And a moment later in the same recorded conversation, he explained that "Bre been handling all my money ... She been handling shit for me and cuz, it ain't just me." So, in her partner’s own words, Taylor had less of a passive and distant role and was more of an active daily participant in operations. Perhaps this is relatable. Maybe many or most of us can imagine ourselves getting mixed up in such a situation and going along with some scheme of our partner or family member… She was wrongly killed, by all accounts and without a doubt, but neither a nurse asleep in her bed nor someone of no interest to police.

But that's not the whole story. It goes much deeper than this. Also revealed in recent documents is that, in 2016, the body of Fernandez Bowman (brother of Damarius Bowman, one of Jamarcus Glover’s associates and someone police arrested along with Glover many times) was found in a car rented by Breonna Taylor. When LMPD detectives questioned her, Taylor told them she did not know the deceased, that she had been dating Glover for some time and that she let him drive the rental vehicle. She also gave detectives her phone number, a number which Glover continuously used.

Maybe she knew nothing and maybe she was entirely innocent but now it appears at the very least like she’s not 'the girlfriend' but someone on police radar and on record as having been involved, to some degree, knowingly or otherwise, at the very least, in concealing a body. Further documents show that Taylor owned an AR-15 that she posed with and tried selling on social media. Other phone messages show the boyfriend she was with when she was killed, not the drug-dealing Glover character but Kenneth Walker, was himself a dealer, one who regularly messaged dozens of people images of pills and pot with prices attached, and in other texts discusses robbing someone of $25,000. To me, all of this begins to paint the earlier messaging about the Taylor tragedy as closer to something like obfuscation and journalistic malpractice (the deliberate stoking of racial animus and distrust of the police?) than a clear accounting of noteworthy global events.

Taylor was neither an innocent bystander nor a peripheral figure in any sense, but directly involved and also enabling several people at the center of a variety of serious criminal investigations over years. And on the night of her killing, we are certain the police didn't have the wrong address nor did they march in and blast away at a lone and unconscious person. Instead, the police were entering the home of a pair of active drug dealers occupying a home that was used to move drugs, drug money, and guns. And then you learn that on the night of her death, Taylor’s boyfriend, Walker, responded to knocks at the front door with a blast at an unknown target from his 9mm. As Walker originally told it, it was Breonna who took the shot that struck the cop. But after a lawyer got involved the story changed to him firing the weapon and only in self-defence, responding to an unknown intruder.

Suddenly the whole tale transmutes into something almost perfectly contrary to the narrative running on social media and in the national and international press.

(The story even has the added radical twist of a Black drug-dealer shooting a cop during a drug raid. This man was not shot and killed – an impossible event if you consume virtually any media. Kenneth Walker was uninjured and instead charged with assault and attempted murder of a police officer. And in what we are lead to believe is a second miracle, those charges were almost immediately dismissed by a judge on the premise of existing stand-your-ground laws in the state of Kentucky. So did Walker experience a pair of miracles, amidst this terrible tragedy, or is the going narrative slightly different than the reality on the ground?)

All of this is to say that nearly every detail I thought I knew about this case, and much of the surrounding vitriol, appears to be entirely fictional. At the very least, the two most commonly known and repeated "facts" are false.

Common claim: As forwarded by Ben Crump, attorney involved with Taylor’s case, who wrote on Twitter on May 11th (and repeated endlessly across the world), police "had the wrong address AND their real suspect was already in custody."

Fact: The relevant search warrant identified Taylor and her address specifically. The Louisville police believed, and were granted a warrant on the grounds that, Taylor had known and close ties to Glover, one of their main suspects. Police were not at Taylor’s residence in error.

Common claim: Countless news reports, podcasts, radio shows, and social media postings claim “Louisville police gunned down Taylor while she was asleep in bed.”

Fact: Both occupants of the apartment, Breonna and her boyfriend Kenneth, were awake and out of bed by the time police entered and fired. Taylor is said to have called out asking who was at the door. Walker also originally stated to police that it was Breonna, the only person struck by police bullets, who fired the first shot. When she was killed by police she was not in her bed or even her bedroom but in the hallway leading to the front door of her apartment.

Again, every bit of this is a stupid tragedy. Nobody should have died, and probably least of all Breonna. Recognizing these numerous tragedies and ensuring they don't happen in the future requires, if nothing else, that we have some idea what actually took place. At present, our best media do not appear to aid in any part of the needed clarification or rectification – even after a sober pause and long after more details emerge. How does any of this get us to a better place? No part of discussing police brutality or policy failures or any form of injustice requires that we intentionally lie or mistakenly mislead one another. In fact, doing something about these problems may require us to establish personal and institutional mechanisms (basic media literacy and professional ethics) that compel us to at least attempt to get the story straight.

One can dream.