[scottw]

Andy McCarthy laid it out pretty clearly in his article this morning...

"Much of what we’ve been told about the case turns out not to be true — another “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” urban legend of police brutality. Most prominently, Attorney General Cameron explained that the police did not execute a “no knock” warrant before entering Ms. Taylor’s apartment. They knocked and announced themselves as police before forcing entry shortly after midnight.

How they came to be at Ms. Taylor’s home, with a search warrant based on probable cause that evidence of narcotics crimes would be found, is the part of the story the social-justice warriors would have us omit. It needs telling.

When she was killed, Breonna Taylor was 26, a hospital emergency-room technician who hoped to become a nurse. But over the years, she had gotten involved with Glover, a 30-year-old twice-convicted drug dealer. Though never a targeted suspect, the New York Times reports that Ms. Taylor was entangled in the frequent police investigations of Glover. Taylor remained romantically involved with him though he had spent years in prison.

In fact, after they first became a couple in 2016, Taylor agreed to rent a car for Glover and, for her trouble, ended up interviewed in a murder investigation. A man was found shot to death behind the steering wheel of that car, and drugs were found in it. Glover was connected to the decedent through an associate but was not charged in the case.

In the years that followed, Glover was repeatedly arrested on drug charges, and Taylor arranged bail for him and one of his confederates on at least two occasions. Weeks before the fateful March 2020 raid, when Glover was in custody after yet another arrest, they were recorded exchanging intimacies on the phone. After that, police surveillance established that Glover continued to make regular trips to Taylor’s apartment, and Taylor herself was seen outside a house investigators say was part of the drug trafficking operations.

Glover and his coconspirators were said to be operating a series of “trap houses” for stashing illegal drugs — crack, marijuana, and prescription pills they were unauthorized to peddle. At the time of Glover’s arrest in late 2019, police observed narcotics pick-ups, had informant information describing crack sales, and executed search warrants that yielded crack, eight guns, and a surveillance system — commonly used by drug distribution organizations to defeat police detection.

After Glover was released on bail, surveillance placed his car at Ms. Taylor’s home, ten miles away, on six occasions over the next couple of months. Taylor’s car was seen in the vicinity of a trap house associated with Glover several times, and the Times reports she was photographed in front of that location in mid-February. Police also had evidence that Glover used Taylor’s address to receive parcels sent by mail. He was seen leaving her apartment carrying a package in mid-January. As of late February — just two weeks before the warrant was executed — Glover was listing her apartment as his home address according to various databases.

On the night police executed the warrant at Ms. Taylor’s apartment, they searched other locations associated with Glover’s drug operation. The Times recounts that police “found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic sachet containing cocaine and fentanyl.” Moreover, the paper adds:

In a series of calls hours after her death, as Mr. Glover tried to make bail, he told another woman that he had left about $14,000 with Ms. Taylor. “Bre been having all my money,” he claimed. The same afternoon, he also told an associate he had left money at Ms. Taylor’s home.

The lawyer for the Taylor family says no drugs or cash were found in Taylor’s apartment that night. A county prosecutor counters that the shootings curtailed the search. If that is true, it is irregular: The fact that a civilian was killed and a police officer wounded would argue for doing an even more thorough search than usual, not calling it off.

In any event, the Taylor family maintains that Breonna’s romantic relationship with Glover was then over, and she was deeply involved with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. They had met years earlier, when they were college students. He used to work at a Coca-Cola warehouse, and she had seen him on and off over the years, including while she was involved with Glover.

On March 13, after working, she met Walker for dinner, and they returned to her apartment, where they watched television and she went to sleep after midnight.

At about 12:40 a.m., the police, led by Mattingly and Cosgrove, knocked on the door and announced themselves as police. Taylor and Walker were startled out of their sleep. Walker, a licensed owner of a nine-millimeter Glock, says he did not know it was the police at the door and speculated that it might be Glover breaking in. For their part, the police expected that Ms. Taylor would be alone — they had not seen Walker enter the dwelling with her.

It was dark and there was a long hallway between the bedroom and the front door. There was screaming. Walker fired as Mattingly came through the door, striking him in the leg and severely wounding him. Mattingly and Cosgrove returned fire into the hallway in the general direction of where they believed the shooter was. When the smoke cleared, Walker was unharmed but Taylor had been struck six times. FBI ballistics experts eventually determined that Cosgrove fired the fatal shot."