According to released grand jury testimony, it was Breonna Taylor who shot at police officers during a March 13 raid on her apartment, boyfriend Kenneth Walker allegedly told police before changing his story.
Former Officer Brett Hankison told investigators during an interview heard by the grand jury that Walker “had told him ‘she was the one who shot at us,'” the Daily Mail reported Friday. “Walker later said that he was the one who opened fire.”
As noted by the outlet, “One of Taylor’s neighbors also told investigators that police had told her that ‘some drug-dealing girl shot an officer.'”
Kentucky’s Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron agreed earlier this week to release recordings from the grand jury proceedings in the Taylor case after a former juror complained that “certain questions were left unanswered” and suggested that information presented to the grand jury was different from what Cameron presented to the public, reported The Daily Wire.
The released audio also reportedly indicated that officers said they knocked and announced themselves for up to one-to-two minutes before breaking down the door of the apartment.
“We knocked on the door, said ‘police,’ waited, I don’t know 10 or 15 seconds. Knocked again, said ‘police,’ waited even longer,” said Lt. Shawn Hoover in a recording from the day of the raid, the Daily Mail reported.
“So it was the third time that we were approaching, it had been like 45 seconds if not a minute,” said Lt. Shawn Hoover. “And then I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s breach it.'”
According to detective Michael Nobles, “officers made so much noise that an upstairs neighbor came outside and had to be told to go back inside,” the report noted.
Taylor was fatally shot during the raid after plainclothes officers returned fire. Walker, who had a legally registered gun, says he fired at the officers not knowing who was at the door, believing they might be “intruders.”
Hoover claimed during testimony that he believed the officers were “ambushed” by the pair.
“We were, in my opinion, we were ambushed,” he said. “They knew we were there. I mean, hell, the neighbors knew we were there.”
As outlined by The Daily Wire last Wednesday, the AG Cameron announced that “witness testimony indicated officers appeared to correctly execute a search warrant on Taylor’s apartment in connection with a drug case and that the two other officers involved in an ensuing shootout with Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were justified in their use of force because Walker fired first.”
Two officers in the case were cleared, and another was charged with wanton endangerment in the first degree — which comes with a maximum sentence of five years — for shooting into a neighboring apartment while returning gunfire sparked by Taylor’s boyfriend.