Third Breonna Taylor grand juror comes forward to criticize handling of case

Another person who sat on the Breonna Taylor grand jury has come forward to criticize officials' handling of the case, claiming that prosecutors only wanted to give officers a “slap on the wrist” for their role in the deadly shooting.

“I felt like there should’ve been more charges,” she said.

The woman, who has remained anonymous, is the third juror to speak about the contentious legal proceedings. Two other members of the panel have previously claimed they were not given an opportunity to consider homicide charges against the officers who carried out the no-knock warrant that culminated in Taylor’s death.

Taylor, a Black EMT, was asleep in bed with her boyfriend on March 13 when three undercover Louisville cops — Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove — burst into her home at around 12:40 a.m. She was shot several times during the botched narcotics raid, which did not turn up any evidence of drugs in the Louisville residence, and pronounced dead on the scene.

Hankison was charged by the grand jury with three counts of wanton endangerment in the case, a low-level felony, for firing into a nearby apartment, where people had been present at the time.

The two officers who allegedly shot Taylor were not charged by the grand jury.

In her interview with the Associated Press on Monday, the latest juror to come forward accused Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron of rushing to “close” the case instead of seeking justice for 26-year-old Taylor and her family.

“No that’s not the end of it,” she recalled thinking. “I didn’t feel that the family was getting justice.”

She added that she and her fellow panel members became frustrated by Cameron’s comments following the indictment, suggesting that the grand jurors “agreed” no other charges were justified after prosecutors “walked them through every homicide offense."

The other two jurors have similarly released statements contradicting these claims from Cameron.

“I felt like he was trying to throw the blame on somebody else, that he felt like we as jurors, we weren’t going to [speak] out,” she said. “He made it feel like it was all our fault, and it wasn’t.”

With News Wire Services