The Killing of Breonna Taylor, Part 1
The Daily- 1,353 views
- 9 Sep 2020
At the beginning of 2020, Breonna Taylor posted on social media that it was going to be her year. She was planning a family with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker; she had a new job and a new car. She had also blocked Jamarcus Glover, a convicted drug dealer with whom she had been romantically involved on and off since 2016, from her phone.But forces were already in motion. The Louisville Police Department was preparing raids on locations it had linked to Mr. Glover — and Ms. Taylor’s address was on the target list.In the raid that ensued, Ms. Taylor was fatally shot. Her name has since become a rallying cry for protesters. Today, in the first of two parts, we explore Ms. Taylor’s life and how law enforcement ended up at her door.Guests: Rukmini Callimachi, a correspondent for The Times, and Yoruba Richen, a documentary filmmaker, talk to Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer; her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker; and her cousin, Preonia Flakes.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: The story of what happened the night Breonna Taylor was killed remains largely untold. A Times Investigation explores the path to the shooting and its consequences.
I got to go now, I'm sorry for that, we turn down here on the deck in the spring of 2019. This video started circulating online and it showed the police in the city of Louisville in Kentucky, making a traffic stop. I got the driver was a black teenage boy. How about they told me to get out of the car now?
He happened to be his high school's homecoming king and a multiple scholarship winner won't have any weapons or no drugs.
No, he had borrowed his mom's car to go buy a slushie at the local store. I didn't believe that. And he suddenly found himself being pulled out of the car, your back being handcuffed and being searched during the questioning.
Your first thing for the offence of making a right turn and this video that went viral online was far from the first time that something like this had happened in Louisville.
There's a call now for a review of Metro police policies, claims of racial profiling on the part of the white police officer.
So in response, the Louisville Police Department enacted a series of reforms.
These changes are meant to reflect our department's values and commitment to fair professional interactions with the public. We have work to do in terms of building trust and legitimacy with the people that we have sworn to serve and protect. And yet those very reforms set into motion a raid that a few months later killed a 26 year old woman.
Her name was Brianna Taylor. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is a daily Rihanna Taylor, Rihanna, Taylor over the past five months, Rihanna Taylor has the name Briana Taylor.
Has become a national rallying cry for those demanding changes in American police arrest the cop, the killers of Briona, protests and celebrities speaking out.
Feel for it. And we want justice, Brianna.
Beyonce is demanding justice for Brianna Taylor. But unlike George Floyd, Eric Garner or Richard Brooks, there's no video capturing the final moments of her life.
Do you know, Brianna, tell a story?
Her whole story today, a Times investigation pieces together. What actually happened to Brianna Taylor? In part one, Rukmini Callimachi tells the story of how police ended up at her door. It's Wednesday, September 9th. All right, let's get started. Oh, Rukmini, where does your reporting start for this story? So I met my colleague, the documentary filmmaker Yoruba, written in Louisville.
So can you start off by telling me your names and what your relation is to Brianna?
And we spent the next couple of weeks speaking to the people who knew Brianna best.
My name is Tamika Palmer. I have two daughters, her mom, Brianna Tyler, Janaya Palmer and Kenneth Walker, her boyfriend.
My name is Brianna Flakes and I am Brianna's cousin. Her cousins.
I'll say our relationship was more like sisters, twin cousins, pre and her very best friends going all the way back to her childhood, her coworkers, and in combination with the thousands of pages of documents that I was able to acquire about her case. What comes across is that this is a young woman who was dealt, I would say, a pretty tough hand in life.
What was your reaction when you found out you were pregnant? How old were you? I was, like, in disbelief. I was 16 years old, though, so she was born to a teenage mom. I just knew I had to be a better person then at that point. So I took it on.
Her dad was convicted on a murder and drug charge when she was just six years old and was sent to prison for the rest of her life.
What was she like as a child? Brown was a good kid. She was easy, even just as a young kid. She just was she was smart.
But what you also see is the challenges of her early life is a person who was trying to push beyond the limitations of her circumstances.
She was one of those people. She made a plan and she went, that was it.
Like it has to be done this way and like, OK, just seeing how she was wanting to be successful, she kind of like drove that into my head. Like, this is what we're going to do. This is how you're going to do it. And I'm going to show you how to do it.
We spoke to one of her oldest friends who said that her mom, when they were children, would not let her go to sleepovers at all except of the sleepover. Was that Brianna's house? Why? Because Breanna was considered the responsible one. She was the one among their little group of friends who made sure that the other girls got to school on time. If there was a sleepover, who made sure that they did their homework? She seemed to be taking almost an adult role in her immediate circle.
Even as a kid, I can remember her being seven years old, saying to my mother, let me check your blood sugar.
When she was very young, she started to show an interest in medicine and in health care and in helping other people. Her mom describes how when Brianna learned that her grandmother had an insulin problem, she wanted to prick her grandmother's finger with a needle and draw blood so that she could test her blood sugar level. She thought that was interesting.
And she kept on asking her grandmother if she could do that, like labor allowed by, see, my mother will add or stick her finger in. And she was like she was so pumped up to do it and hopefully do her insulin.
I'm like, oh, my God, we see that in ninth grade. She begged her mom to give her permission to take the bus and to go start working at a local fast food joint after school. Her friends say that they never really knew her without a job.
She taught me stuff. My own people, my own siblings, my own mother didn't teach me. The family I came from really not supportive. So I used to make little Facebook statuses like who's gonna come to my graduation if I had it? Even though I know you don't really mess with me, Bree will be like, don't worry about them. And as long as I'm by your side, that's all that matters because I'm gonna be there.
Brianna is the first person in her family to graduate from high school and she then goes to college.
Tell me how you met. We met, I guess, on Twitter.
In college, she starts a banter on Twitter with another college student. Kind of like flirting on the timeline, I guess so to say his name was Kenneth Walker.
He went by Kenny to all of his friends and she went to University of Kentucky and I went to western Kentucky.
And they start a sort of emoji filled, flirtatious Twitter banter that by 2016 evolved into the beginnings of a romance end of a relationship.
I kept on telling her I don't want to be friends anymore, but we can be if we have to be what I want to be.
It was an on again off again relationship. But what's clear in this back and forth is that Kanye seemed to really have identified her as the person that he wanted to be.
His life partner seemed like nobody else was there for me. She was always there. And it was Brianna that wasn't 100 percent sure about him.
Some days it was, yeah, let's marry to have a kid. And then other days, like, nah, let's be single and live carefree. Laughs And so it was a million times where I say I'm not Messmer anymore.
Every and I'm sure she said the same thing several times, but everybody we spoke to described him as somebody who genuinely loved her.
We can be friends or we could be everything else to. That's the goal when you're trying to trying to be with somebody or love them, whatever you want to be friends with them also. And that's rare. So if you come across that, I think you should try to take advantage of.
What we now know is that a few months after she started dating Kenny in 2016, she also started seeing another man. His name is DaMarcus Glover. And by all accounts, he's in many ways the opposite of Kenny. DeMarcus is a twice convicted drug dealer. He was sentenced in 2008 when he was 18 years old in Mississippi, his home state for drug trafficking. And later in 2014, he moves to Kentucky. He's charged again for drug possession and he would spend the next several years in and out of jail.
And it bears noting that he he seems to enter her life at what was ostensibly a low point. She had started college, but she dropped out because she felt homesick and was really missing her family. She got her EMT certification and began working as a first responder, riding ambulances. But a year into that job, she quit on social media. She says that she was discouraged by the 16 hour shifts and by the low pay and pretty soon into her relationship with Jamarcus, his problems become her problems.
And this is the first time that you see the police coming and knocking on the door of apartment four at three 00 three Sprinkel Drive. Brian. Is this your place and they came because of a favor that she had done for him. OK, so what's your name? Marcus. What's that? Marcus. Jamarcus, what's your last name? Hello, Glover.
So what happened is she had rented a car. Her own car was apparently in the shop, so she had rented a car from Enterprise Rent-A-Car. And DaMarcus Glover asked her for the keys. She handed over the keys. He then handed them to a third person, a man. And a couple of hours later, that person was found dead, slumped over the wheel of the car. His body was riddled with bullets and on the floor board of the car and in the console, they found several baggies of drugs.
What I need to know what's going on with the rental car and the person that was in that car. I don't know who was in the car. She gave you the car.
The person that ends up dead at the wheel of the car is a man that's known to them only by his nickname, Rambo. And in fact, he's the brother of one of Jamarcus Glover's associates, a member of what turns out to be a criminal drug syndicate. And that man had gone to jail on multiple occasions with Marcus.
Are you all into the game? Oh, no. I mean, come on.
I mean, I wanna say I'm just being honest right here, OK? I know they ain't gonna do the game. I'm not. I'm at the end game. I said the game. Are you working? How did he make his money? How do you make your money.
Oh, la la la la la. I have not been in school before. Are you working now or you work at. I don't work right now. I just left my job a little bit. Where were you with MF Global Network or you know, for them?
A. I saw the police notes and they concluded that Brianna really had no foreign knowledge of how this car was going to be used and that Jamarcus also did not appear to be aware that this man was was going to get killed.
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For details, I'm Eliza Shapiro and I'm a reporter for The New York Times. I write about education for a living and this moment is truly unlike anything I have ever experienced. There are just so many questions. How much will this pandemic widen the gap between wealthy and poor children? Will schooling become a significant part of the education system? Where does all of this leave working parents? And how are teachers adjusting to a radically different type of schooling? The fact is, the answers to all our readers questions are going to be really difficult to find because the story changes day to day, sometimes minute to minute.
But that's what we do at the New York Times. We find the experts, we do the research. We hold our leaders to account until we get the answers we believe you deserve. And when the story changes, we do it again. If you believe in this kind of work and want to support it. But a NY Times dot com slash subscribe.
When you when you talk, to be honest, family and her friends, did Jamarcus come up and what do they say about him?
You know, this was really hard to get out because when we spoke to her mother, her cousins, her best friends, you ask about Jamarcus Glover and either they stop making eye contact with you or they say to you that they don't want to talk about him or they say to you that they don't know him. And this relationship is something that we have essentially uncovered through documents. This was clearly something that those who loved her did not want to talk about.
The closest I got was one of her oldest childhood friends, somebody who's known her since she was in elementary school. And all she would say to me was I didn't like her regarding Jamarcus. But what we see in the documents that we've amassed is that in the next four years, she was on again and off again with Kenny and with Jamarcus. And in the periods that she's with Jamarcus, he repeatedly entangles her and his problems and in his run ins and dealings with police, this is a man who was in and out of jail and he asks her to pay his bail twice in 2017.
And then later in 2019, you see her paying bail for another man, another accused drug dealer who was a friend of two Marcos's and who was believed to be part of this criminal syndicate alongside him.
I worked on that same year, 2019. That's the year that the video of the homecoming king getting pulled over by Louisville police goes viral and wants to go to school because I'm done or it's going to fall out when you get out.
And when he gets pulled over for the infraction of of making a white turn, things very quickly escalate.
Now, he's pulled out of his car by the white police officer with a lot of passion for what they have now. We're allowed to do that.
He's on the phone with his mom and the cops begins searching his car for drugs.
Over here, please, ma'am. We say his mom eventually shows up. Stay over there. Please approach my son. I will take it. If you approach my traffic stop, I will tell you that.
And in the conversation that ensues, another officer begins to explain to the mom the larger strategy of what they're trying to do with these traffic stops.
If this is long time, give them a ticket. You don't have to. That's why we're out here for a ride. We're voluntarily OK. We're Violent Crimes Unit first. We're not narcotics, OK?
We're just we listen to them because I wonder what they would do is they would identify an area that had a high crime rate and then they would flood that area with police officers who would pull people over for minor offenses, for turning without signaling, for having a broken taillight, for making a right turn. And once the people were pulled over, they would search their cars for drugs or for other contraband and essentially look for evidence of more serious offenses.
I appreciate your being out here for violent crimes. Must stay silent. Nothing. No one said you have a violent crime. No one saw the car hands up right now. Can you tell can you tell me how to pick out violent crime as a result?
It created a lot of bad well between the city's police department and the city's black population. Black people who are just going about their daily lives were getting pulled over and aggressively searched when they were doing nothing more than like the teenage boy in the viral video going to the store to get a slushie in his mom's car.
That's early, but you've got caught October 2nd for improper use of the Arizona shot. All right. Have a wonderful day. So it just so happened that the week that the video of the homecoming king went viral that week coincided with a visit to the department of a policing expert named Robin Àngel. She's a professor at the University of Cincinnati and she has been promoting a different approach to policing that has actually really been successful and borne fruit in a couple of communities, including Cincinnati and Las Vegas.
When the video caused the uproar that it caused, the police chief pulled her aside in a conference room and said to her, how can we do better? And what was your answer? Her answer was, instead of letting a large area with police, you go hyper focused and you look at a micro location that has been the locus of rapid crime, a storefront, an abandoned warehouse, a city block, an apartment building. And you ask yourself, what is it about that specific location?
What are the parameters of that location that are making it conducive to repeat crime? And then once you identify that place, you begin putting a lot of police resources into monitoring that micro location. And she told him about how this method of policing had dramatically reduced violent crime, as much as 70 to 80 percent in one particular neighborhood in Cincinnati. So when the police chief hears about this, he naturally got excited. And by December of last year, the police department had created its own squad that was going to target crime through this new method.
So the next thing that happens is they identify the area of the city that has the highest crime and they end up honing in on a street called Eliot Avenue, the 20, 400 block of Eliot Avenue, basically one city block.
So it was on this blog that they erected a pool camera in January, what they saw is that within an hour of erecting the camera on January 2nd, between 15 and 20 cars had stopped in front of 24 24 Eliot Avenue. Twenty four, twenty four. Elliott Avenue was one of four trap houses or drug houses that were being operated by Jamarcus Glover. And this is how Jamarcus basically ends up in the crosshairs of this new squad that was created for the purpose of reforming police conduct in the city that same day.
This is January 2nd, in addition to seeing the 15 to 20 cars that stopped in front of this house, these are presumably customers who are coming and going, buying drugs. They see between five and six p.m. that evening, a Chevrolet Impala pull up. They run the plates and they learned that that car is registered to Brianna Taylor.
Hello, this is a free call from the next day, the 3rd of January, an inmate at Louisville Metropolitan Corrections Department, DaMarcus Glover, is arrested and he makes a series of recorded phone calls to Brianna Taylor from jail.
Hello. Obviously, power comes from somebody in one of those recorded calls you hear to Marcus Glover asking her to arrange his bail by contacting another associate of hers.
You say he was already back at the track and I talked to see if you had contact. And they bond to what we know now.
And in these calls, I think I'm going to be say something like, I got hit by a bus car racing over.
You can sense the intimacy between them working or you know what I'm saying. Ladies and gentlemen, we're flight number. I really don't really like waking up every other hour type shit when you go around a lot. Are you around strength boy or. Who will always be worried about you? I love you all the time and try to measure additional fa la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la.
So DeMarcus gets bailed out, and in the course of the next two months, this newly created squad continues to surveil the trap house that the twenty four hundred block affiliate, they end up putting a GPS on Jamarcus this car and that GPS shows that he makes repeated trips in January between the Trap House and Brianna Taylor's apartment. They also send police to watch her apartment. And on one day in mid-January, they photograph Jamarcus going into her apartment and emerging from it with a package in his hands and then driving straight back to the trap house.
On another occasion in February, they film her and him arriving in the same car at the trap house he has seen getting out of the driver's side door. She's in getting out of the passenger side door. He goes into the trap house. He comes back out and they drive away together. But the thing that the police had missed as they were carrying out this intense surveillance was the new arc of Brianna Taylor's life that had been building for some time.
This is messages from Jan, it says, This year I'm coming for everything she said, I'm speaking it into existence. And she sent two emojis with the fingers crossed and some EYHARTS She was coming for everything she wanted to share.
So thousands when he was a year after leaving her job as an EMT, she got back on her feet and she got a job as an emergency room technician. She picked up a second shift and she was now working basically two jobs at this E.R. and at another hospital. And you see that her that that her life, according to her social media posts, is really on this positive trajectory. She's bought herself a new car. She's going to save up for a home.
And crucially, in mid-February, she appears to break up for good with Jamarcus Glover. And the reason I say for good is there's evidence that's come out since then that indicates that she actually blocked him on her cell phone bills to where they might as well get married.
Do you want be my baby daddy? Yes. And we going to have a baby? Yes, we will.
And from what we know, everything was, like, really good. It was great. She seems to commit to Kenny. It was a whole lot of marriage, talking, baby talk. We had baby names and everything can be just for the record, I was the girl named Kenny and Remix. I like that. So they're very much launched on what looks to be a serious relationship. But even as these sweeping changes are occurring in Brianna Taylor's life, the police are barreling forward on their investigation and they believe by March that they have enough evidence to hit five locations that are crucial to Jamarcus Glover's criminal syndicate.
Four of them are on Elliott Avenue and around Elliott Avenue. These are the trap houses that he operated. And the fifth is the home of Brianna Tanner. Tomorrow on The Daily Show, what happened during the police raid? We'll be right back. This podcast is supported by Kibbee, the streaming service with fresh original stories that unfold in minutes. Kubi has been nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, including the thriller Most Dangerous Game, starring Liam Hemsworth, the piercingly funny comedy Dommy, starring Anna Kendrick, the topical and intense drama Free Rashawn, starring Stefán, James and Laurence Fishburne and the shocking drama Survive with Sophie Turner.
Watch shows like You've Never Seen Tolton Minutes. Download now for your free two week trial. Here's what else you need to know. De La chief of police in Rochester, New York, resigned on Tuesday amid growing outrage and widening investigations into the death of Daniel Pruett by officers in his department. Pruett suffocated after police placed a hood over his head and thrust him into the ground for two minutes, a death that Rochester officials did not disclose. For months, the police chief, Leron Singletary, has denied that the officers involved did anything wrong.
And it's an unprecedented moment.
And I started. Pledge's nine vaccine makers are coming out saying that they will stand with science in an unusual public pledge.
The CEOs of nine drug companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, said that they would not distribute a vaccine for the coronavirus until it had been thoroughly vetted for safety and effectiveness, increasing public concerns about the processes that we are using to develop this vaccines and even more importantly, the processes that would be used to evaluate these vaccines.
We saw with this critical to come out and reiterate our commitment that we will develop our products, our vaccines, using the highest ethical standards. The statement appeared to be a response to claims by President Trump that a vaccine would be ready before Election Day, raising fears that the president may rush the process and undermine public trust in an eventual vaccine. That's it for The Daily, I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. Vanguard was founded on the simple but radical idea that an investment company can succeed because it puts investors first, Vanguard is client owned, you own their funds and the funds own Vanguard, which means Vanguard is built to ensure that your interests will be the priority together.
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