The Truth About Breonna Taylor, Part 1: Separating BLM’s Myth From Reality

Posted on | September 26, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

Take a close look at those photos. They were taken Jan. 2, 2020, in the 2400 block of Elliott Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. These police surveillance photos show a 2016 white Chevrolet Impala, with the Kentucky tag 140 ZAT. Getting out of the car is convicted narcotics trafficker Jamarcus Glover. He is exiting the Impala in front of the so-called “trap house” where he and his associates were dealing drugs.

The owner of that car was Breonna Taylor.

The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) was investigating Glover’s drug ring, and had just installed a surveillance camera near the “trap house” when they got that photo of Taylor dropping off her boyfriend. Barely two months (71 days, to be exact) after that photo was taken, Taylor was shot by LMPD officers executing a search warrant on her apartment as part of their investigation of Glover.

Since her death, Breonna Taylor has been turned into a sort of secular saint by Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement activists who, with assistance from the national media and Democratic politicians, have made the police shooting of Taylor a worldwide cause célèbre. In the process of making her a martyred victim of “systemic racism,” BLM and their enablers have created a myth of heroic innocence around Breonna Taylor. Over and over, we have seen photos of her in an emergency medical technician (EMT) uniform used to illustrate news features about Taylor’s death, although she hadn’t been an EMT since 2016. Celebrities and politicians have repeated the false claim that Taylor was shot while she was “sleeping in her own bed”; in fact she was in the hallway of her apartment, next to her new boyfriend Kenneth Walker, when he shot an LMPD sergeant and Taylor was shot by the officers’ return fire.

The facts surrounding Breonna Taylor’s death are important because activists have tried to make the case a symbol of “systemic racism.” After a Louisville grand jury refused to indict two of the three officers who fired their weapons during that March 13 incident, protests erupted nationwide, and these protests quickly turned violent, with two police officers shot Wednesday night in Louisville. No less a public figure than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused LMPD of murder: “Justice was denied for Breonna Taylor and her family. Just think if it were your daughter, your sister, your cousin, your relative, your friend who was murdered by the police and the charging decision held no one accountable for her death.” Of course, Pelosi said nothing about the fact that police didn’t shoot until after Walker had already severely wounded Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly. More importantly, however, Pelosi’s account of this “murder” omitted any reference to Breonna Taylor’s relationship with the drug dealer whose criminal activity was the reason police were serving a search warrant on her apartment that night.

Jamarcus Glover (left); Breonna Taylor (right).

Two months ago, when most people outside Kentucky had still never heard of Breonna Taylor, I wrote an American Spectator column attempting to clear up many of the myths surrounding the case:

Racism did not kill Breonna Taylor. She did not die from prejudice or discrimination. Her death was not caused by Confederate monuments or statues of Christopher Columbus, nor could her death have been prevented by social-media hashtags. If you don’t know who Breonna Taylor was, the short version of the story is that the 26-year-old was shot to death March 13 by police in Louisville, Kentucky, during a drug raid. The long version of the story is rather more complicated, but Taylor’s death has been reduced to a slogan (“Justice for Breonna”) by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest movement. . . .
“Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover. . . .

You can read the rest of that July 27 column, which apparently was ignored by most of the public figures — journalists, politicians and celebrities — who erupted in spasms of outrage this week over the alleged “injustice” of the Louisville grand jury’s decision. The rioting mobs and TV news anchors seem to be equally ignorant of facts about Breonna Taylor’s death which I was able to report two months ago, and it is frustrating to see such ignorance continue to prevail now, when we have still more information that contradicts the BLM myth.

A Police Leak and the ‘Probable Cause’ Factor

Last month, lengthy articles appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal, the New York Times and other publications revealing details of Breonna Taylor’s association with Jamarcus Glover, including quotes from jailhouse recordings. The source of these details was a 39-page confidential report leaked by someone inside LMPD who was involved in the investigation of Glover’s drug ring. However, while quoting extensively from this report, none of these news outlets published the LMPD report itself. The only place I’ve been able to find this report in its entirety is at The Tatum Report, the website of former Tucson Police Officer Brandon Tatum. Because of bandwidth limits, a direct link to the report might cause a temporary crash, so here is the landing page and I encourage anyone who’s interested in seeing the full report to go there.

Why is this information important? Because, contrary to what was previously reported (what her family’s lawyer told the media) Breonna Taylor’s association with Marcus Glover did not end two years ago. Nor was her relationship with this convicted felon so casual that she could have been unaware of his criminal activities. In fact, LMPD detectives were entirely justified in suspecting Taylor as an accomplice in Glover’s drug ring. Evidence pointing to her involvement went beyond the information included in the police affidavit seeking a search warrant for Taylor’s apartment. The “probable cause” for that warrant was abundant.

 

Say hello to Quenton Se’ville “Q-Tip” Hall. In 2012, Hall was convicted of several felonies, including narcotics trafficking and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and sentenced to six years in prison. He served only about half of that sentence, however, and by 2016 had returned to the streets of Louisville. It was because of Quenton that police first became aware of Breonna Taylor’s connection to Jamarcus Glover.

About 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 2, 2016, LMPD officers were called to the scene of a shooting on South 25th Street. Behind the wheel of a silver sedan, police found Fernandez Bowman, 27, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Bowman had been driving when he was shot multiple times:

His car struck a telephone pole and a fence before coming to rest against a house. . . .
Including Bowman’s death, there are now 112 criminal homicide investigations by Louisville Metro Police in 2016 and 118 in Jefferson County, according to a Courier-Journal count. The toll marks a level of deadly violence not seen in Jefferson County in more than five decades.

Violent crime was increasing in Louisville, and Fernandez Bowman was one of its victims, but he didn’t own the car he died in. LMPD homicide detectives “learned that the vehicle . . . had been rented by Breonna Taylor with an address of 3003 Springfield Drive #4, Louisville, KY 40214.” How did this dead man end up in a car Taylor had rented? Early the next morning, detectives went to Taylor’s apartment:

“Upon contact with Ms. Taylor, Detectivces observed a male in the apartment with her, identified as Jamarcus Glover (DOB: 04/05/1990). Ms. Taylor stated that she did not know the victim and that she found out what had possibly happened from her boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover. Ms. Taylor stated that she had been dating Jamarcus Glover for approximately 3-4 months and allowed him to drive her rental car.”

But if Jamarcus was in her apartment on the morning of Dec. 3, how was it that Bowman had been driving this car that Taylor had rented on Dec. 1? The LMPD report says: “It is important to note that the homicide victim is the brother of Demarius Bowman, which is one of Jamarcus Glover’s associates and has been arrested with Jamarcus Glover numerous times.” So, Breonna Taylor rents a car, which she “allowed” her drug dealer boyfriend to drive, and somehow this car ends up being driven by the brother of one of Glover’s criminal associates, who gets shot to death. Two months later, LMPD arrested Quenton Hall and charged him with murdering Fernandez Bowman.

The scene where Fernandez Bowman was murdered in 2016.

What is the common-sense inference here? Doesn’t it seem likely that Jamarcus Glover needed a “clean” vehicle — a car that couldn’t be traced to him — for some drug-related enterprise? Isn’t it reasonable to suspect that Fernandez Bowman was doing some kind of deal involving Quenton Hall, and that this deal was what led to Bowman’s murder?

Well, that’s just speculation, but we know the facts about Quenton Hall’s arrest two months after Bowman’s murder:

A convicted felon wanted for an early-December murder in the Algonquin neighborhood was arrested [Jan. 31, 2017] after he fled a traffic stop and struck a police car, officials said.
Quenton Hall, 34, of Louisville, who also goes by “Q” or “Tip,” is accused of killing 27-year-old Fernandez Bowman on Dec. 2 near Algonquin Park. His arrest was announced Wednesday morning in a Louisville Metro Police in a Facebook post.
At about 7:15 p.m. Tuesday, officers stopped Hall’s white 2011 Dodge in the 4700 block of Dixie Highway because he’s “known to carry firearms and wanted for a fresh homicide,” according to an arrest citation. Hall attempted to flee and struck a police car.
Once the car came to a stop, officers found marijuana and pills in his pockets, the citation said. They searched his car and found large amounts of methamphetamine and heroin in the center console, and a loaded 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun in the driver’s seat.
Hall was arrested at about 6:45 p.m. Tuesday and charged with murder, first-degree wanton endangerment, first-degree fleeing or evading police, first-degree trafficking in methamphetamine, first-degree trafficking in heroin, first-degree possession of a controlled substance, possession of marijuana, possession of a handgun by a convicted felon and failure to or improper signal.

We have reason to believe that Quenton Hall will spend the rest of his life in prison, and he was subsequently charged with a 2004 “cold case” murder. But the relevance of his case to Breonna Taylor is that Hall was a violent drug dealer, busted with “large amounts of methamphetamine and heroin” and a pistol two months after Fernandez Bowman was killed while driving a car that Taylor rented and “allowed” her drug-dealer boyfriend to drive. If something like this had happened to you — if your boyfriend got you mixed up in a homicide case — wouldn’t you consider that maybe you should find yourself a new boyfriend?

Yet here we see that not only did Breonna Taylor not break up with Jamarcus Glover when this December 2016 murder happened, but that she was still involved with him more than three years later, just before the March 13 police raid in which she died. People are rioting — shooting cops and throwing molotov cocktails — because of BLM anti-police rhetoric about “systemic racism” of which Breonna Taylor was allegedly a victim. Any effort to push back against this rhetoric is drowned out by angry denunciations — you are “blaming the victim” and “justifying murder” if you point to the evidence of Breonna Taylor’s complicity in Jamarcus Glover’s drug-dealing career. But how can anyone ignore this? It is the “probable cause” that resulted in the search warrant for the raid that led to her death. Police believed Taylor could be holding drugs or money for Glover, and they had clear reasons for believing this. As a matter of fact, in a jailhouse phone call after Taylor’s death, Glover said Taylor had been holding $14,000 for him.

LMPD didn’t find that money at Breonna Taylor’s apartment, but did I mention that, not long after she was seen in the 2013 Impala dropping off Glover at the “trap house,” Breonna got a new car? It was a black Dodge Charger, and it was also seen by LMPD surveillance.

 

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

(Support for this report is funded by reader contributions to the Shoe Leather Fund. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.)

 

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