The city of Louisville will pay $12 million to the family of Breonna Taylor to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed six months after the 26-year-old EMT was killed by police.
Taylor was with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker when she was shot by three Louisville police officers who broke into her apartment in the name of executing a no-knock search warrant in a narcotics investigation in March.
Taylor’s family sued the city in April, claiming “officers obtained a ‘no-knock’ search warrant with false information and burst into Taylor’s home after midnight without announcing themselves and ‘blindly fired’ into it, spraying bullets into her house and neighboring apartments with a total disregard for the value of human life,” WDRB News reports.
The settlement, which is expected to be announced later Tuesday by the mayor of Louisville, is the largest police misconduct payment the city has ever paid in a lawsuit, WDRB News said.
Taylor’s name has been trending since March as many support the cause to seek justice for the Black first responder. None of the officers involved in her death has been charged. One officer, Brett Hankison, has been fired.
Officials said the police officers were not wearing body cameras. Following changes that were made after the undercover raid, all officers must now wear and use body cameras when serving warrants. Mayor Greg Fischer also ordered a top-to-bottom review of the department by an outside agency.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was made a special prosecutor in the case earlier this year, and his office began investigating the case in May. A grand jury has been empaneled to investigate the fatal shooting as the FBI also conducts its own investigations.
