Kenneth Walker, the boyfriend of the late Breonna Taylor, has been awarded $2 million by the City of Louisville, KY as a result of a recent lawsuit settlement, The Courier Journal reports.
The multi-million dollar amount was settled during Monday’s federal court mediation, after Walker sued the city and several police officers involved in the fatal no-knock raid on Taylor’s apartment in March 2020.
On the day of the tragic incident, Louisville Metro officers burst
into the wrong apartment, where Walker and Taylor, a 26-year-old unarmed Black woman and EMT worker, were sleeping. They attempted to serve a search warrant as part of a narcotics investigation, but Walker mistook them for intruders and fired a single shot that hit Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg.When police returned gunfire, Taylor was shot to death.
After the shooting, Walker was charged with assault and attempted murder of a police officer. The charges were dismissed permanently in March 2021.
As BLACK ENTERPRISE previously reported, Walker shared details about the botched raid in an interview with the women of Red Table Talk. He said he was in police custody between the hours of 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. when he discovered Taylor had been killed.
“They’re trying to ask me questions about me, and I’m like, ‘Listen, I’ll get to that. Where is Breonna? Is Breonna OK? Is she alive?’” he recalled.
“They didn’t say her name, but they said a woman was killed,” he added. “That’s how I found out.”
However, Walker filed civil lawsuits in both state and federal court in September 2020 in which he sought punitive and compensatory damages against the city and several officers involved with the raid.
The suits claim that Walker’s rights were violated when “officers obtained and approved the ‘materially false’ search warrant, failed to announce before they entered Taylor’s apartment and used excessive and unreasonable force,” as per The Journal. He also holds the police department’s policies, customs, and practices accountable for these violations.
The civil suits named former detective Kelly Goodlett, former detective Joshua Jaynes, and former Sgt. Kyle Meany for their roles in “falsifying and covering up the bad information used to obtain the warrant.” The trio were subsequently charged with federal civil rights violations in August, and were released from Monday’s settlement.
It is not clear if this settlement also complies with the lawsuit filed in state court.