Kentucky’s top prosecutor pleaded for patience Thursday as his office investigates the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor — more than three months after her March 13 death in her Louisville home.
“We are working around the clock to follow the law to the truth,” Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who’s now serving as special prosecutor on the case, said at a news conference Thursday.
Cameron refused to offer any timeline for charging decisions involving the three Louisville police officers who shot and killed Taylor in a barrage of gunfire during a botched narcotics raid.
The officers were serving a no-knock warrant in a case involving a suspect who allegedly received packages at Taylor’s address years earlier. The suspect had been apprehended at another location hours before the shooting, unbeknownst to the officers, a lawyer for Taylor’s family previously told the New York News.
“An investigation of this magnitude, when done correctly, requires time,” Cameron said Thursday.
“We understand the urgency, we understand the public outcry, and we understand the need for the truth and the desire for justice,” he said. “I ask for people to continue to be patient with us as we walk down this path.”
Cameron said his office, which took over the probe last month, has been reviewing case “material” handed over by the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Public Integrity Unit as it takes its own “independent steps” to determine what happened.
The three plainclothes officers — Sgt. Jon Mattingly and Detectives Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison — allegedly used a battering ram to gain entry into Taylor’s apartment shortly after midnight on March 13.
Taylor, a licensed EMT working in a hospital emergency room, was shot at least eight times in the ensuing chaos.
Her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, a licensed gun owner, used his legal firearm in self-defense, attorney Benjamin Crump said.
Taylor’s death along with the May 25 homicide of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer and the police shooting death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on Friday have fueled an ongoing wave of protests around the country against police brutality and systemic racism.
The three police officers involved in Taylor’s death have been on paid administrative reassignment since the incident that’s also being investigated by the FBI.
———
©2020 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.