The city of Louisville, Ky. has agreed to pay $2 million to settle two lawsuits filed by the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, according to The Associated Press.
The state and federal lawsuits were settled more than two years after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said he mistook police officers for intruders when they used a battering ram to gain entry to her apartment on March 13, 2020 and execute a search warrant.
Mr. Walker fired a single shot, hitting an officer in the leg. The officers returned with a barrage of bullets that struck and killed Taylor. Her death sparked nationwide protests and demands for accountability from the police department.
The lawsuits, which were filed in 2020 against the city and the officers involved, claimed that Walker’s rights were violated when officers obtained and approved the “materially false” search warrant, neglected to announce before entering Taylor’s apartment and used excessive and unreasonable force.
“He will live with the effects of being put in harm’s way due to a falsified warrant, to being a victim of a hailstorm of gunfire and to suffering the unimaginable and horrific death of Breonna Taylor,” one of Walker’s attorney’s, Steve Romines, said according to the AP.
Walker was initially charged with the attempted murder of a police officer, but the charges were dropped in March 2021.
Prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department charged three Louisville officers earlier this year with conspiring to falsify the Taylor warrant. Kelly Goodlett, one of the now-former officers, pleaded guilty and admitted to assisting in falsifying a link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer.
In August, Walker wrote in the Washington Post that a police officer had “finally accepted some responsibility for the death of my girlfriend.”
“Knowing all the problems that this failed raid would create, the Louisville police tried to use me as a scapegoat to deflect blame,” he wrote. “It almost worked.”
Two other former officers involved in the warrant, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, are scheduled to go on trial in federal court next year.
The city of Louisville paid a $12 million settlement to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, in September 2020.
According to Walker’s attorneys, a portion of the settlement he received will create a scholarship program for law students who want to practice civil rights law. Another portion will go to the Georgetown Law School’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, which focuses on police and community reform.