Rukmini Callimachi Profile picture
Sep 23, 2020 16 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1. A big day in Kentucky: I'm in Frankfort, the state capitol, where any minute now the attorney general will announce whether the three officers who opened fire killing Breonna Taylor will be charged. My investigation into what we know so far is here: nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/…
2. High security in building where reporters were told to come. We got barely 1h40 minutes heads up that press conference would be in Frankfort, a 50 min drive from Louisville, where reporters were stationed. Streets blocked off. My bag was searched by hand and by a police dog.
3. Charges have been announced: No charges filed against two of the officers, Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, and several counts of wanton endangerment for the third officer, Brett Hankison: nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/…
4. Legal experts we interviewed before the decision said it was unlikely that Mattingly & Cosgrove would be indicted. They were in the hallway of Breonna Taylor's apartment after the door was punched in & returned fire when her boyfriend shot at them, thinking it was an intruder
5. The third officer - Brett Hankison, the only one of the three to be fired - was in the formation by the door but he ran out of her apartment and into the parking lot & began firing into her sliding glass door & window with no line of sight, according to his termination letter
6. Legal experts - and I interviewed a bunch - warned that the two officers in the doorway had a self-defense claim because they did not fire first. Hankison is the one who, they argued, did not have such a claim since he was out of line of fire when he shot
7. This is far from what the family of Breonna Taylor wanted. Her mother had said that nothing short of arresting and criminally charging all three officers with murder would be enough. Her lawyer called for at least manslaughter charges for all three.
8. More details in the story below and we will be updating readers throughout the day. My colleagues are fanned out across the square in Louisville where protesters have gathered. I'm waiting for the press conference to begin in Frankfort: mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbo…
9. Some key quotes from the attorney general: "I know that not everyone will be satisfied," he said. "If we simply act on outrage there is no justice – mob justice is not justice. .. Do we really want the truth? Or truth that fits our narrative?"
10. He also suggested the law may not be adequate to deal with a case like this: "This is a tragedy and sometimes the law is not adequate to respond to a tragedy," he said, adding: "Det. Cosgrove and Sgt Mattingly were justified in returning fire, because they were fired upon."
11. New information from the press conference: Cosgrove shot 16 times - more than any other officer. Hankison shot 10 rounds, and Mattingly six, so total of 32. Cameron also debunked theory that Mattingly may have shot himself or been shot by friendly fire.
12. He said the bullet that went into the officer's leg was from a 9 mm gun, which is what Kenneth Walker, Breonna's boyfriend was using. The rest of the officers were using 40 caliber guns.
13. He also said that the officers had knocked and announced themselves as police. This is key: Breonna's boyfriend says he opened fire because he heard the knocking at nearly 1 am, but no one saying police so he thought it was an intruder. We interviewed almost a dozen neighbors
14. And of the nearly dozen neighbors we spoke to, only *one* said he heard them scream police - a truck driver who was on the staircase above her apartment, returning from a late shift. I asked Cameron if that is sufficient? To warn people in middle of the night that its police?
15. His answer was that the grand jury had determined that the amount of notice given was sufficient. He did not directly address my query: Did the investigation find more than the truck driver who heard the announcing?
16. These and other details are in the deep-dive we did on the killing of Breonna Taylor here: nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Rukmini Callimachi

Rukmini Callimachi Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @rcallimachi

Jun 2
1. Happy Sunday everyone. Follow along for a thread on a worrying trend in the housing economy: Families are stuck in their starter homes. They can't sell, and so first time buyers can't buy: nytimes.com/2024/06/02/rea…
2. For the past two decades, home prices have soared, but the price of the lowest tier - the cheapest homes in a given market - have gone up the fastest.

See this graph using @CoreLogicInc data by @KarlNYT: Image
@CoreLogicInc @KarlNYT 3. The bottom tier - what we call a "starter home" - has soared 189% since 2004, while the average for all single family homes in that same period is 113%: Image
Read 11 tweets
May 30, 2023
1. I've been waiting for @StejarelO's book on the legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci to come out in English and it's finally out. So many scoops between these covers: Image
2. What @StejarelO did is he mined the kilometers of archive left behind by Romania's feared secret police to put together the story of the girl who got the sport's first Perfect 10. It's a gripping and also disturbing account of the violence she was subjected to, and the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
3. Everyone in Romania wanted a piece of Nadia and the secret police began spying on her when she was just 13. According to the files he was able to consult, @StejarelO found that the Communist regime deployed dozens - maybe as many as hundreds - of informants to spy on the teen.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 20, 2021
1. The discovery of ~1,000 graves at schools for indigenous children in Canada has cast a spotlight on a dark past. But long before those discoveries, Native American activists have been asking the US to provide an accounting of how many children died on this side of the border:
2. Along with Navajo photographer @Schischillyy, I set out to Colorado to one campus, Fort Lewis College, which was built on the bones of a former boarding school known as the Fort Lewis Indian School and which has been wrestling with its complicated past since 2019:
3. For decades, the university has provided a tuition waiver to Native American students as a kind of reparation. But it wasn't until two years ago, when a Native American professor @theoreticalfun rode her bike past these panels that the college began its own, full-on reckoning:
Read 13 tweets
Jun 3, 2021
1. More than 400 universities in America have instituted vaccine mandates. But the rules were devised with domestic students in mind who have access to the three vaccines available in the US. What about international students who can't get those vaccines?nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/…
2. In the US, students are considered vaccinated if they received the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Most universities are telling international students they will accept those three plus any others vetted by the WHO. That leaves out students like Milloni Doshi:
3. Milloni is from Mumbai and is due to start her masters at Columbia this fall. She's been vaccinated with Covaxin, which is not WHO approved. Columbia and many other colleges in the US are telling students like her that they will need to be revaccinated once they come on campus
Read 11 tweets
May 22, 2021
1. More than 400 universities have announced students will not be able to enroll next fall if they haven't been vaccinated for Covid-19. A look at a map of where they are located shows that 92% of these colleges are in states that voted for Biden:
nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/…
2. A tracker compiled by @chronicle, which is updated every day, shows that just 34 colleges out of 404 are in states that voted for Donald Trump in the last election: chronicle.com/blogs/live-cor…
3. The electoral map serves as a near exact proxy of which colleges have imposed the vaccine requirement, speaking to our divided politics and to how politicized the pandemic has become. To understand what was happening I interviewed 2 dozen university leaders, like Katie Conboy
Read 11 tweets
May 5, 2021
1/ Three million. That's the estimate of how many children have dropped out of school as a result of the pandemic. To see in slow motion what it's like when a child falls behind, @tamirbenkalifa & I spent a week with 11-year-old Jordyn as he tried to learn nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/…
2/ Jordyn's single mom, Precious, earns $12-an-hour as a security guard at a casino in Tunica, Miss. She is just below the cutoff for government assistance, and on her salary all she can afford is a $400-a-month apartment. It has no stove, no fridge - and crucially, no internet
3/ What does that mean for Jordyn in the age of remote learning? It means that he needs to wait for his mom to get home from work in order to use her cellphone to log into his virtual class. We sat next to him on this couch as he struggled to do math class on this phone:
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(