One of the worst things about the death of Breonna Taylor is that the cops involved have been held accountable for almost everything but actually killing her.
It’s been more than two years since Breonna Taylor was killed in her own apartment by cops serving a warrant they lied to get, and just as long since her family and activists have been asking for someone—anyone—to charge the cops who killed her, to no avail. Since then, four of the cops involved have been fired. One, Brett Hankison, was tried and acquitted in state court, not for shooting Taylor but for wanton endangerment in unloading his pistol into adjacent apartments with no clear target.
Three more officers have been charged with federal crimes in a case in which prosecutors have laid out how they misled a judge into giving them the no-knock warrant that led to Taylor’s death, and then met to get their stories straight once the deadly results of their actions became clear. Still, though, no charges for Taylor’s death.
Now there’s another legal chapter of the story: a couple whose apartment was hit by gunfire in the incident is suing one of the cops who pleaded guilty in the federal warrant-lying case. Chelsey Napper and Cody Etherton say that former officer Kelly Goodlett’s guilty plea last month amounts to an admission that her lies led directly to the bullets that came through their walls, damaging furniture and putting their lives at risk.
It bears pointing out that Napper and Etherton are white; Taylor was Black. That fact doesn’t make their logic any less solid: when somebody’s lie leads to hot lead flying over your head as you sleep, that person just ought to be accountable, not just criminally, but their pockets should hurt for a good long while, too.
But it does beg the question of why no one has yet been personally held accountable for actually killing Breonna Taylor and how much her race had to do with it?