National Affairs

“She Loved Who She Was Becoming”: Breonna Taylor and a Family’s Fight for Justice

More than three months after Louisville police killed Taylor in her home, the officers have yet to be arrested. Now, a quiet family and community are at the center of a national and global movement demanding change.

National Affairs

“She Loved Who She Was Becoming”: Breonna Taylor and a Family’s Fight for Justice

More than three months after Louisville police killed Taylor in her home, the officers have yet to be arrested. Now, a quiet family and community are at the center of a national and global movement demanding change.

By Jordan Ritter ConnJune 18, 2020, 12:03 pm UTC • 30 min

Late on the morning of what would have been her daughter’s 27th birthday, Tamika Palmer sits at a conference-room table with a thin smile on her face, and thinks back to the day her first child was born. “I didn’t want to be a mother,” Palmer says. She was too young, she thought, still only 16, too afraid of the great challenge of caring for another life. Her labor was long, hard, painful. Eighteen hours, then an emergency C-section. Palmer was unconscious for a long while after giving birth, but when she came to, she took her baby in her arms, and the sheer reality of her child’s existence overwhelmed her. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Palmer says. “I just woke up!”

It felt like too much, too fast. When Palmer took her daughter home, she listened to her cry and cry, and she wondered, then, if perhaps she’d made a mistake. “I was a kid having a kid,” Palmer says now, long after they both had grown into women. “I knew I wasn’t ready, but what could you do at that point?” 

Time passed. Her daughter survived one night in this world, then two, then three. Palmer taught her how to eat, to walk, to speak. And Palmer learned from her daughter, too. “She taught me that I wanted to be a mom,” Palmer says. “She taught me how to love. She taught me …” She shakes her head, eyes distant, smile lingering, and gives the faintest hint of a shrug. 

“Everything.”

In the years that followed, her daughter grew up. “We grew up together,” Palmer says. They moved from Michigan to Kentucky. Her daughter became a woman; found community and calling; found love. And then, early on the morning of March 13, 26 years and 282 days after she was born, police entered her home and killed her. She was asleep when the police arrived. She had violated no laws. She was not the target of any investigation. She lay in bed with her boyfriend, then dozed off while watching a movie, until police broke down her door and shot her eight times.

Her name was Breonna Taylor.

“Say her name!”

“Bre-on-na Tay-lor!”

“Say her name!”

“Bre-on-na Tay-lor!”

It’s late spring in Louisville, four days before Taylor’s birthday. Thin clouds send the sun scattering in all directions, until it sets over a mass of moving people, who march together in mourning and purpose and rage. Taylor’s name is taped on backpacks and written on signs, scrawled on pavement and painted on trucks, shouted over the sound of police choppers and honking cars.

And it’s not just in Kentucky. Protesters chant Taylor’s name in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, Chicago and Boston. In New York, they sing happy birthday on June 5. In London, they hold signs with her name and photo, dressed in full uniform as an EMT. Alicia Keys leads a PSA calling for her killers’ arrest. John Legend writes an op-ed demanding her justice. Beyoncé sends an open letter to Kentucky’s attorney general demanding the same. All have been pieces connecting Taylor, a Black woman, to a much larger movement, Black Lives Matter, “working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.”

Up until late May, though, news of Taylor’s killing remained unknown even to many here in Louisville. “Honestly,” says Larry Brooks, “I didn’t even know about her until I came out here to protest.” Brooks, who is Black, has been out for several nights in a row marching with a few of his old high school baseball teammates. “But at first,” he says, “I was out here protesting for George.” He’s talking about George Floyd, the Black Minneapolis man who was killed on May 25 when white police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, all recorded on camera, showing Floyd as he called out for his dead mother and said, “I can’t breathe,” all while Chauvin kept his hand in his pocket, as if relaxed. The white officer killed Floyd more than two months after white officers in Louisville killed Taylor, both of them preceding Rayshard Brooks and following Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, and so many other Black people killed by police, all of their slayings feeding the grief and anger that has brought our country to its current reckoning with the racism that pervades it.

For months, though, Taylor’s family had been seeking her justice right here in town. Police killed Taylor after three officers broke through the front door of her apartment on the justification of a “no-knock warrant,” which allows officers to enter a home without first knocking or announcing their presence. They were outlawed in Louisville on June 11, and according to an op-ed by Radley Balko in The Washington Post, the particular warrant used to enter Taylor’s home in March violated a 1997 Supreme Court ruling. After entering her home, officers fired more than 20 rounds into her apartment, eight of which hit Taylor, killing her.

“All she wanted to do was save lives,” Palmer said at a news conference this month, when Louisville’s Metro Council passed the law banning no-knock warrants, which has since been named “Breonna’s Law.” “With this law,” Palmer said, “she’ll get to continue to do that.” 

And yet, her killers remain free. The FBI began investigating Taylor’s killing on May 21 (the bureau has said that it would not comment further while the investigation is ongoing). For Taylor’s aunt, Tahasha Holloway, the more time that passes without arrests, the more she worries they’ll never come. “I feel like they’re really just trying to wait us out,” says Holloway. “Wait until all the protesting is done. Wait until … the smoke dies down, to really just be like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re not charging anybody. We’re not doing anything.’ That’s what I feel is happening here.”

All three officers are now on administrative reassignment, but remain employed by the Louisville Metro Police Department. One, Brett Hankison, faces an unrelated investigation into accounts of sexual assault. Mayor Greg Fischer has said that quickly firing the officers would be ineffective because state due process requirements allow fired officers to appeal and return to the job within a week, receiving back pay and damages. Palmer’s attorney, Lonita Baker, has argued against this thinking. “These officers can be fired,” she told WLKY. “They do have rights to appeal, but there’s no guarantee they would win appeal. … There’s nothing restricting him from terminating these officers.” Added Palmer, speaking to MSNBC in early June: “I want these officers arrested. I don’t think they should still be on payroll. That’s justice for Breonna.” [Update, June 19: Fischer announced on Friday that the city is in the process of firing Hankison. The other two officers involved, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, remain on administrative assignment.]

After police pounded on and broke down the door to Taylor’s home, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who later described to investigators his own terror and confusion in this moment, shot and injured an officer. Walker told investigators that he never heard the officers identify themselves as police and that he and Taylor were both afraid of whoever was at their door. Authorities initially charged him with attempted murder, but dismissed the charge last month, pending further investigation. “He was scared for his life and her life,” Walker’s attorney, Rob Eggert, told The New York Times.

Nearly three months later, on June 10, authorities released the incident report from Taylor’s killing. It is virtually blank. Where the form asks whether officers used forced entry, “No,” is checked, which contradicts a police statement later in the morning after the shooting. In a space asking for injuries Taylor suffered, the report says “None.”

Neither she nor Walker were targets of any investigation. A judge had signed the warrant only because police said they believed a suspected drug dealer had used Taylor’s apartment to receive packages. (An affidavit cited information from an interview with a U.S. postal inspector, but Louisville postal inspector Tony Gooden has said that “no packages of interest” were going into Taylor’s home.) At the time police killed Taylor, their actual target was already in custody. And so, for weeks now, Louisville has been filled with daily protest. “They know it’s not going to end until justice is served,” says Taylor’s cousin Catrina Smith. “At the end of the day, people are not going to stop.”

Throughout these protests, police have used tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flash bangs against protesters, and appeared to target a local reporter who was on camera. Just after midnight on June 1, Kentucky National Guard shot and killed David McAtee, a Black 53-year-old owner of a local barbecue stand. Police said McAtee had fired at them first. Surveillance footage shows that McAtee appeared to be carrying a pistol on his hip, and it shows him raising his arm in the air, though it’s unclear whether he ever fires. Police body cameras were turned off during the shooting; in response, Fischer fired police chief Steve Conrad later that same day.

“The news is fucked up,” Brooks says. “Police are killing us, right here.” Now, the protesters also march for McAtee. “Enough is enough,” Brooks says. 

He’s joined on this Monday night by thousands of others, of all races and ages, spreading out across the street, shutting down traffic, chanting along the way—demanding justice for Taylor, for Floyd, for so many others. 

“No justice! No peace! Breonna was asleep!”

When her family talks about Breonna, tenses blur. One story unfolds in the past, another in the present. She is here and she is gone and then she is here, with them once again. “She’s a softie,” her aunt Holloway says, face bright, smile open. Moments later, she deflates. “She was just so awesome,” she says. “I just want her back.”

In the immediate aftermath of Breonna’s killing, restrictions on large gatherings imposed due to the threat of COVID-19 hindered her family’s mourning. Now that her killing is a public cause, there’s little room for private grief. “The pain,” says her cousin Smith, “never goes away.” 

She was kind and funny, demanding and obsessive, full of exuberant love. People orbited around her. Says Holloway, “I hate talking about her in the past tense.” 

Breonna was 7 when Palmer first noticed her daughter’s sense of calling. “My mother was diabetic,” Palmer explains. Once she understood the condition, 7-year-old Breonna became consumed by caring for her grandmother’s health. “Granny!” Palmer remembers Breonna saying. “Let me check your blood sugar!” Long before she ever thought of becoming an EMT or emergency room technician, 7-year-old Breonna would march around her grandmother’s house in search of the blood glucose monitor, and she would stick her grandmother’s finger and check the results. They couldn’t stop her. “Breonna,” Palmer says, “was everybody’s boss.”

The family’s roots are in Alabama, but during Jim Crow, Breonna’s great-grandmother Annie Ruth moved to Michigan as part of the Great Migration. She fled a state where lynchings were common and segregation was enshrined in law, searching for opportunity by moving nearly as far north as the American north goes. But the structures of white supremacy weighed heavily on the family up north, too. Their town of Grand Rapids had few Black-owned businesses. As of 2014, 47 percent of its Black residents lived in poverty, compared to just 15 percent of white residents. From 2013 to 2015, Black drivers were more than twice as likely to be stopped by police than non-Black drivers, and from 2001 to 2010, the county in which they lived had one of the highest increases in racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests. “I felt like there was a gray cloud over everybody,” Palmer says of her community in Grand Rapids. “A lot of people always seemed unhappy.”

When Breonna was about 13, Palmer decided to return the family south, to settle in Kentucky. Palmer had family and friends in Louisville, and she loved the weather and the city’s sense of openness and opportunity. “Every time I would come to visit,” she says, “there was stuff happening for kids here.” And for so much of their time in Louisville, the city fulfilled their hopes of what it would deliver. “She loved it here,” Palmer says of Breonna. “She loved who she was becoming.”

Breonna’s family members have learned about the killings over the years, one after another, most entering their consciousness as they’ve scrolled through their phones. Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, so many others. Black people linked by their public killings by police.

Holloway thinks back on another slaying. “The little boy that got killed by police?” she says, referencing Tamir Rice, a Black 12-year-old boy killed in Cleveland in 2014. “That was so horrible.”

Scroll back through Holloway’s Facebook page, and there are photos of Rice, face round and warm, and a petition demanding that his killers be brought to justice. There are posts about Michael Brown, the Black 18-year-old whose killing ignited the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and about Garner, who told the New York City officer who was choking him to death, “I can’t breathe.” And then there is a post from Holloway on May 22, 2015, linking to a Democracy Now story on the police killings of Black women. Its headline begins with a now-familiar phrase: “Say Her Name.”

Holloway can remember the first time she saw a new addition alongside that list of familiar names. Her niece. The moment stunned her. “I cannot believe I’m about to say your name,” she remembers thinking. “Add your name to this list.” Breonna’s name is now on signs next to Floyd’s and on T-shirts with Castile’s; her face has been shared across social media next to Bland’s. Celebrities from Ariana Grande to Kumail Nanjiani, Seth Rogen to Kim Kardashian West, have all tweeted out the same words: “Arrest the cops who killed #BreonnaTaylor.” That sentence and the message behind it have spread widely across social media. Her memory no longer belongs only to her family. It belongs to the fight for a world where the state will no longer slay women who look like her. It can feel inspiring, yes, but so deeply unfair. White families rarely have to march for justice while they mourn. “Like, this is really something that just happened,” Holloway says, still considering the surreality of the situation. She shakes her head, pensive for a moment. “She really is a part of this now.” 

Across the nation and the world, Breonna’s and Floyd’s killings have unleashed pain, fear, despair, and rage. Here in Louisville, Palmer has called for peaceful protest. In a statement in late May, she said of her daughter, the “last thing she’d want is any more violence.” Other members of her family make sure to say that they don’t support violence, but they can identify with the anger at its root. “We are tired,” Smith says. “It’s enough. We yell that it’s enough, and you’re not listening. When are y’all gonna start listening?”

Holloway compares the feeling to sleep paralysis, the terror when you wake up, locked in your own body, temporarily unable to move or speak. “You feel like you’re screaming and nobody’s hearing you,” she says. “And we’re people that’s been screaming, and now this is the result.

“You’ve tried all the sensible ways,” she says. “You can’t kneel. You can’t stand here in silence. What are you supposed to do? They always talk about, well, ‘Be like Martin Luther King.’ Them people who wore suits and ties, they still got the dogs put on them. They still got beat up. He got assassinated by the same people that’s always saying to be like him. So what do you do?” In Minneapolis, civil disobedience sparked a vow from city council members to disband the police department, righteous uprising leading to government action. Here in Louisville, though they’ve passed “Breonna’s Law,” so much remains to be done. She pauses for a moment, thinking. “I feel the rage,” Holloway says. 

She thinks through her own cycles of emotions these last few months. Sadness and aching loss are sometimes overshadowed by anger. “You want to be out there tearing shit up,” she says. “You want to be out there tearing this whole city to the ground.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has spread to every corner of the country and across much of the world. Marches have formed in cities large and small, in coal country and in the desert, in largely white towns and on Native American reservations; in New Zealand, in Berlin, in Tokyo. That global movement rests on a collection of local actions. In cities like Louisville and so many others, Black activists have done the work of demanding justice for many years.

Attica Scott beams with pride over that work. “We’ve always locked arms together,” Scott says of Louisville. “And I believe what you’re seeing right now is because of that and a result of that. That you see the protests, you see the acts of love, you see the solidarity because we’ve been intentional about that relationship building and that power building.” 

Scott grew up in a housing project on Ninth Street, which has long served as the dividing line between Black and white neighborhoods in a city that remains among the most segregated in America. Her mother, who gave birth to Scott while still in high school, named her after the Attica Correctional Facility, home to a 1971 uprising in which inmates took 42 staff members hostage and demanded more humane conditions. As a small child, she moved with her parents to California, where they joined the Black Panther Party. When they returned, and she grew into adulthood, she continued their work, becoming a community organizer focusing on criminal justice and racial equality in her hometown. Voters elected Scott to the State House of Representatives in 2016, when she became the first Black woman to serve in that legislature in almost 20 years.

A few nights before we meet, Scott attended a protest downtown. “We were peaceful,” she says. “All of us.” Then police moved in, dispersing the crowd with tear gas. “Within a matter of seconds,” she says, “it was over because of law enforcement, not because of us.” This has been a pattern, here in Louisville and throughout the country. Protests against police violence have been met with more police violence.

In the months since Taylor’s killing, Scott has commuted back and forth between her community in Louisville and her work in the state capital, Frankfort. An activist by nature, she struggled with spending time in Frankfort while others were demanding justice back home. “I know my folks in Louisville,” she says, “they’ve got this. I wish I could have it, but I’ve got to have y’all up here.” In Frankfort, she works to give voice to the terror of Black Louisvillians in the halls of Kentucky’s power.

“Frankfort is the Sunken Place,” she says, referencing the movie Get Out. “It truly is. Oh my goodness. I feel it in all my whole being.” She points to bills she’s sponsored: one creating a state curriculum to teach Black and Native American history, one to ban discrimination against natural hair, yet another to repeal Kentucky’s “gang bill.” Since Louisville passed “Breonna’s Law,” Scott has said she wants to extend it across all of Kentucky. In Frankfort, the needs she observes in Louisville go unheeded by so many of her colleagues in the capital. “The only reason you are not hearing it is because you are deeply steeped in your racism,” she says. “The only reason you’re not hearing it is because you feel like, ‘It’s not my problem,’ which means you’re dismissing your constituents, who are Black and Latinx and other people of color. And so, when that movie came out, I said, ‘This is it. You have now given me my best description of this place that I go to.’”

Charles Booker knows a similar feeling. One of a handful of Black people serving in the chamber, he is now running in the Democratic primary to challenge Mitch McConnell for a U.S. Senate seat in November. When he makes the case for policies that would bring racial justice, he finds a range of responses from his white colleagues at the state capital. “There is often an intent from the majority of them to understand,” he says. “Then I’ve also seen those that could care less, and that yelled at me on the House floor to ‘sit down’ when I’m screaming out, ‘My life matters too.’”

Sitting in his campaign office one afternoon early this month, Booker explains how his experiences growing up in the West End neighborhood shaped his approach to the present moment. “I’ve seen a lot of trauma as it relates to law enforcement,” he says. He remembers sitting on the porch with friends as a child, watching cops roll up in armored vehicles, ripping neighbors’ doors off their hinges, SWAT teams rushing inside their homes. He’s been profiled and pulled over without cause, had a gun pulled on him by police. “It undermines your sense of ever feeling safe,” he says. When he saw wars depicted on TV and in movies, they often felt familiar to his life in a world rife with violence, so much of it enacted by the state. “All of that stuff,” he says, “just really affects your sense of identity and humanity.”

Booker grows solemn when asked about Taylor’s killing. “She was defenseless,” he says. “Doing what she could to do the right things and trying to help people. I think it just reiterated once again to some of us—it doesn’t matter what you do.”

The news reopened wounds, for Booker and for so many others across Louisville and beyond. “It’s not just about Breonna Taylor,” he says. “It’s just like the next worst, terrible scenario in a long line of terrible scenarios.” Booker has pushed for a citizen review board with subpoena power to investigate the killing. In a joint press conference with Mayor Fischer, he has discussed the need for state legislation that would allow for the firing of officers in the midst of ongoing investigations, when merited by extreme circumstances. As the movement has swelled, he’s been encouraged by the solidarity in expressions of anger. “I don’t even think it’s protests anymore,” he says. “I think it’s more like an uprising of folks that realize we cannot go back to waiting for this to happen again.”

When they moved south from Michigan, her family says Breonna felt thrilled by the way she melted into life in Louisville, by how easily she fit into the schools. “I’m a genius here!” she bragged to anyone who would listen. After she graduated high school, she felt pulled to a life in the medical field, doing for others what she’d once done for her grandmother. She matched that compulsion with a draw to adrenaline. “I didn’t know if she was going to be a nurse or a race car driver,” says Palmer.

As an EMT, she was a little bit of both. “To be honest,” says Palmer, “when she first started I was like, ‘Yeah, right, Breonna.’ I knew she liked to help people, but this was a different type of help.” But she loved the energy, the rush, the chance to step directly into need. When she tired of that work, it wasn’t because of the intensity, but of the moments of boredom. EMTs spend a lot of time waiting. Breonna wanted to be in full motion, all the time. She made plans to go to nursing school, and in the meantime, she became an emergency room technician at University of Louisville Health–Medical Center East. “She loved it,” says Palmer. “Everything about it. She felt like you see what’s happening as soon as people come in. People come in scared. Just being able to make people feel better about being there.”

She had her family. She had a job that fulfilled her and a path to a long career. And she had her partner, Kenneth Walker. “He freaking loved her,” says Palmer. So much so that Palmer found herself taking his side in small arguments. Sometimes, Walker would be doing the dishes, and Breonna would scold him, saying he was loading a bowl in the dishwasher the wrong way. “Kenny!” Palmer remembers saying. “Don’t let her talk to you like that!”

Always, inevitably, he shrugged and he smiled. “It’s OK,” Palmer remembers him saying. “I love her. I’m gonna marry her.”

In the way of many mothers, protecting their future in-laws from their children’s sharper edges, she’d laugh and push back, “You want to deal with this all your life?”

He did, she says. Breonna was worth it.

Palmer remembers seeing her daughter on the day of Thursday, March 12. It was brief, just saying hi, but Breonna talked about reconnecting that night. “Her and Kenny was going out to dinner,” Palmer says. “She wanted to know what I was doing.” Palmer was tired, and she said not to worry about her, that she was going to get some rest. Breonna, though, was undeterred. “We coming to find you and see what you’re doing,” Palmer remembers her saying. Late that night, Palmer was in bed when her phone rang and she saw that Walker was calling. “I’m thinking, ‘Here they go,’” she says, assuming they wanted to convince her to hang out. 

But it wasn’t that. Walker was screaming. He sounded panicked. Someone had broken into their home and shot Breonna.

The home is tucked away, up a hill and down a long drive, near the edge of an apartment complex and surrounded by a thicket of trees. Cars come and go; neighbors shuffle in and out of their own apartments. A small SUV pulls into the parking lot, and a mother and teenage daughter exit and walk up the sidewalk, carrying flowers. They are white, blond, and quiet. They approach the window of apartment no. 3, a first-floor unit, and place their flowers there on the grass, next to several more bouquets, most of them now wilted, and a sign that says “Justice For Bre.” They stand together for just a few seconds, still and solemn, before walking back to their vehicle. “There’s something about seeing where a crime was committed,” says Emily Bingham, the mother. “I feel for her family. I feel for her community.” 

A few minutes later, a Black woman emerges on the balcony outside her second-floor apartment, and she sits down in a chair, taking in the late-afternoon quiet, holding an unlit Swisher Sweets cigar. She asks not to be identified by name. “She was really nice,” the neighbor says of Breonna. They didn’t talk much, she says, just a few hellos, a little small talk on their way to and from work. 

The neighbor thinks back to the early morning of March 13. “I was sleeping,” she says. “I woke up to gunshots.” She didn’t know what to do. She felt shocked, then panicked. Her own daughters, 18 and 19 years old, were both awake, just after midnight, and they began to panic too. As we’re talking, the neighbor’s daughters walk up outside, and one of them, who also asks not to be identified by name, joins her mother on the balcony and thinks back to that night. “I heard the police banging,” she says, “and then I just heard a shot go off.”

In her fear, the neighbor remembers doing the only thing she knew to do when surrounded by gunshots. She reached for her phone. She dialed 911. “You need to get police over here now,” she remembers saying.

And she remembers looking out the door in that moment, and only then, after the barrage of gunshots had ended, seeing someone reach into a car and turn on a blue flashing light.

“Oh,” she remembers saying. “They are here.”

Through the family, Walker declined to be interviewed for this story. When requesting that the charges against Walker be dismissed, however, commonwealth’s attorney Tom Wine released portions of audio from an interview Walker had with investigators the night police killed Taylor. (The LMPD did not answer calls requesting comment for this story.)

On the recording, Walker explains that he and Taylor were watching a movie in bed, and that she had dozed off. “There’s a loud bang at the door,” he says. “She popped up out of bed. It scared her to death. And me too.” He explains that one of Taylor’s exes had shown up at their home before, and that he initially thought that perhaps the man had returned. “The first thing she said was, ‘Who is it?’ No response. So we’re like, ‘What the heck?’

“We both get up, start putting on clothes. Another knock at the door. She’s like, ‘Who is it?’ Loud. At the top of her lungs. No response. … So I grab my gun, which is legal. I’m licensed to carry. Everything. I’ve never even fired my gun outside of a range. I’m scared to death. … There’s another knock at the door. She’s yelling at the top of her lungs. … No answer, no response, no anything.”

He explains that they both grabbed whatever clothes they could find and moved toward the door. “The door comes off the hinges,” he says. “So I just let off one shot. I still can’t see who it is or anything. So now the door’s flying open, I let off one shot, and now all of a sudden there’s a whole lot of shots. And, like, we both just dropped to the ground. And the gun fell. … I’m scared to death. Now we’re seeing lights and stuff. So at some point, ‘OK, it’s the police.’ And there’s a whole lot of yelling and stuff. So there’s just shooting. And we’re both on the ground, and when all the shots stop, I’m, like, panicking. She’s right there on the ground. Like, bleeding, and …”

His voice trails off for a moment. “Yeah.”

He breathes heavily. He and the LMPD investigator go back over a few details, and then he continues. “Next thing I know, she’s on the ground, and the door’s busted open, and I hear a bunch of yelling, and I’m just panicking, and … I’m yelling, ‘Help,’ because she’s right here bleeding, and nobody’s coming. And I’m just confused and scared. And I feel the same right now.”

After the gunshots, the neighbor remembers minutes passing, chaotically. More officers arrived. Blue light filled the once-dark parking lot. She remembers hearing the officers shouting, “Come out!” And soon she saw Walker, walking outside the apartment, his hands in the air. “He was crying,” she says. At that point, so were the neighbor and her daughters. The terror of the moment had overwhelmed them. But in Walker, she saw something different. “That cry,” she says, “looked like something much more.”

One of her daughters recorded a video through the window, which she showed me, and in it you can see a man with his arms raised, walking backward in the direction of the officers, while they scream at him, “Get on your knees!”

What the neighbor remembers most is the way Walker cried as he did exactly as the officers told him. “At that moment,” she says of herself and her daughters, “nobody knew Breonna was down there dead.”

“It was a nightmare,” Palmer says.

That’s how she remembers that night and the next morning, the long, frantic hours she spent waiting to hear that her daughter was dead. After getting Walker’s call, Palmer and her sister, Holloway, drove to Breonna’s apartment, and there they saw police everywhere, blue lights flashing, bodies in motion through the dark. 

Palmer says she explained to an officer that she needed to get through to see her daughter. The officer, she remembers, told her she should go to the hospital. So she and Holloway rushed to University of Louisville Hospital, where they tried to find answers. “We went to the counter,” Holloway says, “and the lady was like, ‘We don’t see her name.’” She remembers another hospital worker confirming that she was not in one of their beds, not in their system, and so Palmer and Holloway returned to Breonna’s home.

By the time they got back, the scene had begun to clear. Still, they found no answers. “It was, like, hours,” Holloway says. “We stood there waiting for somebody to come talk to us.” Finally, she says, “one detective came and started asking questions.” Did they know, she remembers the detective asking, whether Kenny or anyone else wanted to harm Breonna? She remembers her own confusion. “I thought the police were looking for the person that was trying to break into the house,” Holloway says, “because we didn’t know what was happening. And then we knew that Breonna had got shot, but we were still hopeful that she wasn’t dead.”

The sun began to rise. Another officer approached, asking still more questions about Breonna, including, Holloway says, whether she was selling drugs.

“And then Mika was like, ‘Where’s my daughter?’”

“Well, ma’am,” Palmer remembers the officer responding. “She’s still in the apartment.”

Says Palmer, “I knew then.” Her daughter was dead. Palmer cries as she begins to tell this part of the story. Later, Holloway fills in the rest. She explains that she and Palmer remained “out there, just screaming and crying and stuff. And then we went back to the house and we just sat there for a while and just cried.” Since that moment, Palmer says, she spends a lot of time “thinking about her and wondering, and feeling like she died alone.”

News trickled out slowly. Early reports referred to Taylor only as an unnamed “suspect” who’d been killed during the “narcotics investigation.” To see her mentioned that way, as anonymous collateral damage, filled Palmer with new levels of despair. In the days and weeks that followed her daughter’s killing, she sat in her home, deeply lonely. “Just still not really knowing why this happened,” she says, “or what led for it to happen, or just not having answers. Just not feeling like people were knowing or listening.”

On April 27, Palmer filed a lawsuit against the city seeking compensatory and punitive damages. Twenty-five days later, the charges against Walker were dropped as the FBI began investigating Taylor’s killing. Now, as Taylor’s memory has become part of a movement, a part of history, Palmer thinks back to those early, lonely moments, to those days when she wondered whether her killing would be forgotten.

“She was a real person,” Palmer says. “That’s why we’re so adamant about ‘Say her name.’”

They’re saying her name now, on a recent Wednesday afternoon in Saint Matthews, an 87 percent white suburb just outside of Louisville. The streets are lined with mostly white protesters, who hold their signs aloft and shout at passing cars, “Your silence is compliance!” Again and again and again.

Several Black men lead the chants, whipping up energy. One is Montez Jones, who wears a red tank top and works his way through the crowd. “This is beautiful!” He tells me. “Look at this!” 

The protest was organized by Kayla Meisner, a 26-year-old Black woman who grew up just across the river in southern Indiana but attended the University of Louisville and made the city her home. Meisner was raised by a white mother and has spent much of her life navigating predominantly white spaces. “I’m used to having these conversations with white people with great intentions but no idea what to do with them,” she says. “I’ll spend my energy on those people.”

In her personal life, she has taken on this job in more settings than she can count. “I feel like I’m always the educator or the translator,” Meisner says, “and that job is exhausting.” At some point, the burden falls on the privileged to do the work of educating themselves. But, still, for now, she embraces this role. 

And so Meisner is here. Taylor’s killing has weighed on her. They are about the same age, and sometimes Meisner lies in bed next to her own boyfriend and imagines the security Taylor must have felt before the officers charged into her home. She worries, at times, about Taylor’s killing being forgotten. Unlike in so many other cases, there is no viral video. “You don’t have to see Black trauma to know there is Black trauma,” she says. So now she stands on the sidewalk, and when cars stop at the red light, she walks among them, handing out flyers. “Nine out of 10 people love it and say thank you,” she says. As the cars pass, many honk horns in support. Others stick fists out of windows. Others, though, serve as reminders of how much work they have left to do. Today, one woman pulls up and says, “This is what makes people hate you. Why can’t you keep it downtown? You’re disrupting people’s lives.” Meisner keeps her cool. “Will you just take and read this paper?” She asks. “I think we agree on a lot of things.” The flyer lists their demands, which include abolishing no-knock warrants (which Louisville has now done), banning officers from chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles, and, ultimately, defunding the Louisville Metro Police Department. “OK,” the woman says, and she takes it and drives away.

Even as this movement has stretched across the world, Taylor’s family remains at its center. Among them, they have differences of opinion; at any moment, varying emotions. Palmer has taken on the role of spokeswoman. An introvert, she never wanted to become an activist, but the option of silence belongs to mothers without dead children. “I don’t like to talk,” she says. “I don’t really tell people a lot of stuff that’s going on with me. It’s just that now, it’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than Breonna.”

Holloway sees her sister as an unlikely woman filling an essential role. “I think sometimes in life, people are called to do things that they didn’t recognize they could ever be called to do,” she says. “And I feel like that’s my sister right now.” And so Palmer takes the interview requests. She speaks at press conferences. She goes to rallies. She makes sure the world does not forget her daughter’s name.

The day after Breonna’s birthday, the city holds a celebration and protest wrapped in one. The family stands on the steps of the Hall of Justice, the crowd stretching through the street and the park, down several blocks. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is here. So is a relative of Muhammad Ali. And Palmer stands with her family, taking it all in. After a few speeches, and even more chants, the crowd joins together to release blue-and-white balloons to the sky in Breonna’s memory, gorgeous spheres floating up to the clouds.

The next day, the family gathers at Palmer’s home. Children run through the living room, laughing and playing. Teenagers sit together, thumbing through their phones. It’s the end of Breonna’s birthday weekend, and her family is together, just as she always liked it. “Breonna would have been right here,” says Smith, her cousin. “Laughing, having a good time.”

Palmer enters the room to ask Smith what kind of seafood takeout she wants for lunch, and then she lingers. For once this weekend, Palmer seems at ease. She tells a story. Not from this day, not from this weekend or even this year, but all the way back when she was a scared teenager in a hospital, delivering a baby she didn’t know she could raise. Lying there, surrounded by her sisters and cousins and aunts, the women who’d built her family, she wondered about her new child. What will be her name? 

They pulled out a piece of paper. Together they brainstormed ideas. This was her family’s way. The women worked together to make a life for generations to follow. “It was a group effort,” she says. “We had all these names written down.”

They tossed ideas back and forth. Says Palmer: “And then once we said, ‘Breonna,’ everybody was like, ‘Yeah. Breonna.’” 

“It fit her, too,” says Smith.

“Yeah,” says Palmer. “It did.”

Now the name conjured by the women of Palmer’s family is chanted by people all over the world. It staggers her, how the ache of her loss and the rage and hope of this movement can exist together at the same time. She walks over to a corner of the living room, where the family has erected a shrine in Breonna’s memory. She looks at the photos and paintings, a box of birthday cards written by strangers to her daughter. “Look at all this,” she says.

She thinks back over the weekend. To the day before, the moment on the stairs of the Hall of Justice, the massive crowd letting go of those gorgeous balloons. “It was overwhelming,” she says, her voice soft, “but it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

Smith nods. “It looked too beautiful to even really cry,” she says. “You know what I’m saying? Like, you feel like you know the pain was there …”

Palmer interjects. “I cried a little, but it wasn’t sadness.”

“Right.” 

“It wasn’t sadness. It was like …”

Palmer collects her thoughts for a moment. She is a quiet woman at the center of a loud movement, someone still figuring out how to carry that weight. Her eyes remain soft, her smile faint but unmoving. “All I kept saying was, ‘Look at this love.’ Like, it’s just love. You know what I’m saying?”

The flowers in the room look fresh, the paintings untouched, pristine. “I felt like I was a part of some movement,” Palmer continues, “that it wasn’t about me and Breonna. It was just about a bigger cause, a bigger thing. You know what I’m saying?”

Tomorrow she will return to her unlikely work, the long and determined fight for her daughter’s justice, and with it, the justice of Black people everywhere. But now, here in her home, surrounded by those who loved Breonna, she lets herself indulge, ever briefly, a moment of hope.

“I was just like, ‘Look at the world change.’”

Jordan Ritter Conn

Conn writes features for The Ringer. He is the author of ‘The Road From Raqqa,’ the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and currently working on a book about masculinity in America.