Ballistics records in the shooting of Breonna Taylor by Louisville, Kentucky, police tell a different story than the one Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron presented last week, the Louisville Courier Journal reports.
Police shot and killed Taylor in her apartment while executing a no-knock warrant in March. A grand jury investigation concluded Taylor's boyfriend fired at officers when they entered, and they returned fire, Cameron announced Wednesday. But Cameron's assertion that the investigation ruled out "friendly fire" as the source of the 9mm shot that hit Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly's thigh isn't backed up by a Kentucky State Police ballistics report from the scene, Vice News first reported.
"Due to limited markings of comparative value" on the bullet that went through Mattingly's leg, it was neither "identified nor eliminated as having been fired" from Walker's gun, the report concluded. An LMPD record showed one officer at the scene was also issued a 9mm gun, making it impossible to draw a conclusion.
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Vice News also reported that documents and body camera footage taken after Taylor's killing show "officers appearing to break multiple department policies," and "corroborate parts of Taylor's boyfriend's testimony." The LMPD requires all officers involved in a critical incident to be "paired with an escort officer at the scene and 'isolated from all non-essential individuals for the remainder of the initial investigation,'" Vice News writes.
But none of the seven officers in Taylor's case were seemingly paired with an escort, and four of them continued investigating the scene even after being told to clear out. "I've never seen anything like this,” a former LMPD narcotics officer who revealed the footage told Vice News. "This is not how it's supposed to work."
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