Breonna Taylor’s former neighbor — whose apartment was also hit with bullets on the night of her death — responded to the indictment of Brett Hankison in a new interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal. Stanley David — who lived directly above Taylor’s home — said he never heard police officers announce themselves before busting through her door.
When Hankison, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly opened fire on Taylor and her boyfriend, bullets also ripped through David’s hallway and bedroom door, he told the Courier. He was asleep at the time; as was his daughter, mother and another man and his child.
“My apartment was hit, too,” he told the outlet. “The bullet that came through my floor right in front of my bedroom door. If that bullet went through my bed, maybe I would have been dead, too. I’m a human being, too.”
David, a 47-year-old man from Liberia, called the entire experience “terrible.” He said that neither he nor anyone in his apartment heard cops knock or announce themselves before executing the raid, which contradicts the police account that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron defended last week.
“I don’t think that’s right,” David said of the grand jury’s decision. “Breonna was not doing drugs and she got killed for nothing. She never had a gun. She did not shoot any shots.”
David has since moved out of the apartment, as he told the Courier that the shooting had traumatized him and his family.
“Breonna was nobody like they claim,” he added. “For as long as I knew her, I didn’t see anybody coming there with anything like that. There weren’t people coming in and out. It was only she and her boyfriend.”
Since Cameron announced the grand jury’s decision to indict only Hankison last week, Taylor’s family has called for the AG to release the transcripts from the jury’s deliberation. Ben Crump, one of Taylor’s family’s attorneys, said the charges left her loved ones “outraged,” “insulted” and “offended.”
Besides murkiness in whether or not police announced themselves before the raid, the validity of Cameron’s claims that Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, shot officer Mattingly in the thigh has now also been questioned. As reported by REVOLT, the Kentucky State Police ballistics report has shown that while the bullet that hit Mattingly could have come from Walker’s gun, it could have alternatively come from ex-officer Hankison’s.