Tamika Palmer is opening up about the night her daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by Louisville police officers in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
“Kenny [Taylor’s boyfriend] calls me in the middle of the night. He says, ‘Somebody kicked in the door and shot Breonna,’” Palmer recalled. “I am dead asleep. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I jump up. I get ready and I rush over to her house. When I get there, the street’s just flooded with police — it’s a million of them.”
Palmer says when she got to the road where her daughter’s apartment was located, an officer told her the she needed to go to the hospital because an ambulance had already left the scene with a victim. Once she arrived at the hospital, she waited for over two hours just to find out that her daughter wasn’t there yet.
She went back to Taylor’s apartment and officers asked her if she knew anyone who would want to harm her daughter or Kenny. The officer said, “Well, Kenny’s at one of our offices. He’s trying to help us piece together what happened here tonight.” Palmer stayed around for hours. She left to grab some coffee and returned back to her daughter’s apartment.
“It’s about 11 in the morning when the officer comes over and says that they are about done and they are wrapping up, and we will be able to get in there once they are finished,” Palmer continued. “I say, ‘Where’s Breonna? Why won’t anybody say where Breonna is?’ He says, ‘Well, ma’am, she’s still in the apartment.’ And I know what that means.”
The following day, Palmer found out that the police were the ones who shot her daughter. “Someone texts me and says, ‘Did you see the news?’” she recalled. “Of course, I didn’t see the news. I didn’t know nothing about it. I watch everything on my iPad. I Google the news station and then I watch the story.”
“And I am like, ‘Why would they ask if somebody wanted to hurt her?’ Now I’m confused,” she continued. “Because you asked me whether I knew someone who wanted to hurt my daughter. But you did it. Why couldn’t you have just told me that the police did this?”
Palmer also said that the police officers never let her see her daughter’s body. She wasn’t able to view the body until the funeral home called. It’s been more than five months since Taylor was killed and no one has been charged or arrested with her death.