Fired Officer Is Indicted in Breonna Taylor Case; Protesters Wanted Stronger Charges

A former officer was charged with “wanton endangerment” for endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors with gunshots when she was killed by police officers in her Louisville apartment.

People in Louisville, Ky., sobbed and had to be consoled after Wednesday’s grand jury announcement in the Breonna Taylor case.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A grand jury weighing evidence in one of the country’s most contentious police shootings indicted a former Louisville police detective on charges of reckless endangerment on Wednesday for his role in the raid on the home of Breonna Taylor, but the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor six times faced no charges.

Protesters poured into the streets in Louisville after the announcement, and at least two police officers were shot shortly before a 9 p.m. curfew. There were also demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and smaller cities around the country.

The demonstrators called for all three officers, who are white, to be held to account for Ms. Taylor’s death in March. The officers had fired a total of 32 shots after they stormed her apartment with a warrant.

Prosecutors found that the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor, who was Black, were justified in their use of force because they had identified themselves as officers and had then come under fire from her boyfriend, who said he thought it was intruders forcing their way inside. The charges against former Detective Brett Hankison were for firing recklessly into a neighbor’s apartment.

Ms. Taylor’s death, which came months before George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police, became a rallying cry for racial justice protesters nationwide. On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of demonstrators chanted Breonna Taylor’s name between sobs and scowls as they wound their way through the streets of Louisville. They carried signs that said “abolish police” and “Black lives matter.” Dozens of cars followed, honking their horns.

For more than two hours, the police followed in silver cruisers without intervening. But eventually a line of officers in riot gear confronted protesters, released chemical agents and arrested several people in the crowd.

At a news conference on Wednesday in Frankfort, Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, walked through the grand jury’s decision in detail in an effort to defuse the rage.

“The decision before my office is not to decide if the loss of Breonna Taylor’s life was a tragedy — the answer to that question is unequivocally yes,” he said.

Mr. Cameron, a Republican, acknowledged that not everyone would be satisfied with the charges and said that as a Black man, he understood the pain that was brought about by Ms. Taylor’s death.

“Justice is not often easy and does not fit the mold of public opinion. And it does not conform to shifting standards,” Mr. Cameron said.

The grand jury decision to indict Mr. Hankison came after more than 100 days of protests on the streets of Louisville and after a monthslong investigation into the death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot in the hallway of her apartment by officers executing a search warrant as part of a drug investigation.

Grand jurors indicted Mr. Hankison, a detective at the time, on three counts of “wanton endangerment,” saying he had imperiled the lives of three of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing bullets that reached their apartment.

Mr. Hankison fired through a door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment building that were covered with blinds, violating a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight. At least some of his rounds reached the apartment directly behind Ms. Taylor’s, where a pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child were asleep. The rounds shattered the family’s glass door but did not harm anyone.

Mr. Hankison is the only one of the three officers who fired their weapons who was dismissed from the force, with a termination letter stating that he showed “an extreme indifference to the value of human life.”

All summer across America, Ms. Taylor’s name has been chanted and her image held up on posters at rallies protesting police brutality, with celebrities writing open letters and erecting billboards that demanded the officers be criminally charged.

In anticipation of the grand jury’s decision, the Louisville Metro Police Department canceled vacations and Chief Robert J. Schroeder said officers would not be granted time off. A local judge signed an order shutting the federal courthouse downtown, where storefronts and office towers were boarded up because of demonstrations that sometimes turned violent.

The concern about further unrest appeared prescient after two police officers were shot on Wednesday night. In a video livestreamed by the department, officers fired several projectiles while marching south along Brook Street. Moments later, several other bangs were heard, and the officers scattered. “Shots fired, shots fired,” said the woman recording the video as she ran for cover. Officers took cover behind a police truck and began shouting “officer down!”

Robert J. Schroeder, the Louisville police chief, said at a brief news conference that a suspect was in custody and that neither of the officers’ injuries were life-threatening.

Tensions boiled over at several protests nationwide. In Buffalo, a truck drove through a group of people who had gathered to protest, according to a local reporter at the scene. Demonstrators blocked highway traffic in Milwaukee, and protesters who marched from Brooklyn into the Lower East Side of Manhattan yelled at patrons in restaurants: “Wake up, this is your fight too!”

Protesters marched in Louisville after Wednesday’s announcement.

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After the announcement, protesters shrieked in disgust. Shouts of “That’s it?” rose from the crowd. One person called for the city to be burned down. Several people broke down in sobs.

Desaray Yarbrough, who walked out of her Louisville house as people in the crowd marched past it, said the announcement would do nothing to quell angry demonstrators.

“It’s unjustifiable,” Ms. Yarbrough said. “The lack of charges is getting ready to bring the city down.”

Ms. Taylor’s mother, who had sued the city of Louisville for wrongful death in April, received a $12 million settlement last week. But Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, wrote on Twitter that the lack of additional charges was “outrageous and offensive.”

Many legal experts had predicted that indictments would be unlikely, given that a state statute in Kentucky allowed citizens to use lethal force in self-defense and that it was Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend who had fired first.

“As an African-American, as someone who has been victim of police misconduct myself, getting pulled over and profiled, I know how people feel,” said John W. Stewart, a former assistant attorney general in Kentucky. “I have been there, but I have also been a prosecutor, and emotions cannot play a part here.”

During the raid, two officers, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, returned fire after Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot that struck Sergeant Mattingly in the leg, Mr. Cameron said. Mr. Walker’s bullet pierced Sergeant Mattingly’s femoral artery, and officers scrambled to apply a tourniquet to his leg.

The officers who broke down Ms. Taylor’s door shortly after midnight on March 13 had come with a search warrant, signed by a local magistrate. They had court approval for a “no-knock” warrant, which Louisville has since banned, but the orders were changed before the raid, requiring them to knock first and announce themselves as the police.

Mr. Walker has said that he and Ms. Taylor did not know who was at her door. Only one neighbor, out of nearly a dozen interviewed by The New York Times, reported hearing the officers shout “police” before entering.

The warrant for Ms. Taylor’s apartment was one of five issued in a case involving her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, who is accused of running a drug trafficking syndicate. At the other addresses that were searched, officers found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic sachet containing cocaine and fentanyl, police logs and a laboratory report show.

The surveillance leading police officers to Ms. Taylor’s home included a GPS tracker showing repeated trips by Mr. Glover to her home; photographs of him emerging from her apartment with a package in his hands; footage showing her in a car with Mr. Glover arriving at one of the trap houses he operated; and his use of her address on bank records and other documents. The F.B.I. has opened an investigation into whether the inclusion of her name and address on the warrant violated her civil rights, as her family’s lawyers have claimed.

The announcement on Wednesday revealed several new details in the case. Investigators at an F.B.I. laboratory reviewed the ballistics evidence and concluded that the shot that killed Ms. Taylor was fired by Detective Cosgrove. A total of 32 shots were fired by the police: 16 by Detective Cosgrove, 10 by Mr. Hankison and six by Sergeant Mattingly. The attorney general said none of Mr. Hankison’s rounds struck Ms. Taylor.

Mr. Cameron, who ran on a law-and-order platform, said the investigation and the grand jury determined that the police had properly knocked and announced their presence before bursting into Ms. Taylor’s apartment — a point disputed by Mr. Walker and by a number of neighbors who have said in interviews with reporters that they heard no announcement.

A memorial to Ms. Taylor in Louisville.

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For months, Ms. Taylor’s death has been a rallying cry. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called out her name during the Democratic National Convention. Oprah Winfrey paid for billboards demanding the officers be charged, writing in her magazine, “We have to use whatever megaphone we can.”Rukmini Callimachi reported from Louisville and Frankfort, Ky., Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York, and John Eligon and Will Wright from Louisville. Julie Bosman contributed reporting from Kenosha, Wis. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Russian Opposition Leader Leaves Berlin Hospital After Poisoning

Doctors treating Aleksei Navalny said he had been discharged after 32 days of treatment and could make a full recovery.

Aleksei A. Navalny, center, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, in Moscow last year. He was poisoned with a highly toxic nerve agent last month.

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LBERLIN — Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, has been released from a hospital in Germany and could make a full recovery from poisoning with a highly toxic nerve agent, doctors said on Wednesday, as European leaders wrestled over a response to Moscow.  

“Based on the patient’s progress and current condition, the treating physicians believe that complete recovery is possible,” the Charité hospital said in a statement released on Wednesday. “However, it remains too early to gauge the potential long-term effects of his severe poisoning.”

Neither the doctors nor Mr. Navalny, 44, who has returned to communicating with his supporters through his Instagram account in recent days, gave any indication of where he would go after his release. But a senior German security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the opposition leader’s movements, said he would remain under protection in Berlin for rehabilitation.Mr. Navalny has said that he intends to return to Russia once he has made a full recovery. He arrived at the hospital, one of Germany’s leading research clinics, on Aug. 22 after being evacuated by air ambulance from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had been receiving treatment after collapsing on Aug. 20 while aboard a domestic flight to Moscow.

Russia has maintained that it played no role in the poisoning of Mr. Navalny, although he would not be the first Kremlin enemy to be attacked with a class of Novichok, a Soviet-designed chemical weapon. A similar agent was used by Russian operatives in Britain in 2018 to attack Sergei V. Skripal, a former intelligence officer who had served prison time in Russia for spying for the British before being traded in a spy swap.

Given the substance used, the German authorities and others say there is no doubt that the Russian government was behind the poisoning. Such an act would be a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which Moscow is a signatory.

The organization is expected in the coming days to release the results of its own analysis of biomedical samples collected from Mr. Navalny by its team of experts. Leaders in Berlin and Paris are awaiting the findings before moving to impose financial sanctions on Russia through the European Union.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, during a Sept. 14 phone call between President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader stonewalled with denials and offered dubious explanations for Mr. Navalny’s poisoning, suggesting that the Russian opposition leader might have poisoned himself.

Although Mr. Macron’s office declined to comment on the report, which was published on Tuesday and based on unspecified sources, Mr. Navalny responded with a sarcastic comment on his social media account.

“It’s a good theory,” he said. “I think it is worth the closest study.”

“I boiled Novichok in the kitchen, quietly took a sip of it in the plane and fell into a coma,” he continued. “Before that, I agreed with my wife, friends and colleagues, that if the Health Ministry insisted on taking me to Germany that they would never permit that to happen. Dying in an Omsk hospital and ending up in an Omsk morgue where the cause of death would be listed as ‘lived long enough’ was the ultimate goal of my cunning plan.”

“But Putin,” he said, “outplayed me.”

Once Mr. Navalny arrived in Berlin, doctors at the Charité hospital placed him in a medically induced coma in the intensive care ward, where he spent 24 days, while also under constant police protection.

Suspecting that their patient was suffering from an agent more complex than what they could detect, they sent samples to their colleagues at the Military Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich, which found traces of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in Mr. Navalny’s blood and urine.

It was also found on a water bottle that the opposition leader’s team brought to Germany from his hotel room, leading them to believe that he was poisoned there, not at the airport as had originally been suspected.

Laboratories in France and Sweden have confirmed the German findings that Mr. Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok family.

Russia has been insisting that it is willing to open an investigation of the Navalny poisoning but that it has been stymied by the refusal of France and Germany to share the results of their analyses, an assertion that Mr. Putin repeated in his conversation with Mr. Macron, Le Monde said. Both countries have insisted that Moscow had all the information it needed from the two days Mr. Navalny spent in Russia before he was evacuated to Germany.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev, told a German newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, that Mr. Navalny had not responded to attempts from the embassy to provide him with consular services.

Erdogan Talks of Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again, to International Dismay

The World Heritage site was once a potent symbol of Christian-Muslim rivalry, and it could become one once more.

 

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Turkey’s president wants to convert Hagia Sophia in Istanbul back into a mosque, which threatens to set off an international furor over one of the world’s architectural treasures.

ISTANBUL — Since it was built in the sixth century, changing hands from empire to empire, Hagia Sophia has been a Byzantine cathedral, a mosque under the Ottomans and finally a museum, making it one of the world’s most potent symbols of Christian-Muslim rivalry and of Turkey’s more recent devotion to secularism.

Now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making moves to declare it a working mosque once more, fulfilling a dream for himself, his supporters and conservative Muslims far beyond Turkey’s shores — but threatening to set off an international furor.

The very idea of changing the monument’s status has escalated tensions with Turkey’s longtime rival, Greece; upset Christians around the world; and set off a chorus of dismay from political and religious leaders as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say he has raised the issue of restoring Hagia Sophia as a mosque every time he has faced a political crisis, using it to stir supporters in his nationalist and conservative religious base.

The cathedral, built in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, stood at the center of Christendom for nearly 1,000 years, until Mehmed II conquered Constantinople and turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque

But given the severity of the challenges Mr. Erdogan faces after 18 years at the helm of Turkish politics, there may be more reason than ever to take the talk seriously. Having lost Istanbul in local elections last year, the president has watched the standing of his party continue to slide in the polls as the Covid-19 pandemic has further undone a vulnerable economy. On July 2, a Turkish administrative court ruled on whether to restore Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, its Turkish name, as a mosque, and revoke an 80-year-old decree that declared it a museum under Turkey’s secular state. The ruling will be announced within two weeks, and then Mr. Erdogan is expected to make the final decision. For more than 25 years since he became mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan has been working to leave his stamp on his beloved home city. He cleaned up the Golden Horn, built bridges and tunnels across the famous waters and placed new mosques at the most prominent sites.

But it is Hagia Sophia, one of the oldest and architecturally one of the most impressive cathedrals in the world, that commands pride of place on the historical peninsula. Completed in 537 AD, Hagia Sophia stood for nearly a millennium at the heart of the Christian world, crowning the fabled city of Constantinople. It is unsurpassed for its grandeur and immense dome. In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, and although his troops plundered what they could carry, the building was saved and turned into a mosque. For 500 years it was the venerated center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Turks record with pride that Ottoman rulers doted on the great building, assigning the best architects to embellish it. Minarets were added, and later the great Ottoman architect Sinan built massive buttresses to prevent the walls from buckling under the weight of the dome, which was damaged in earthquakes. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the status of Hagia Sophia changed again. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular republic of Turkey, ended the role of religion in the state and closed religious institutions. Byzantine churches, including Hagia Sophia, were made into museums, ending their religious function and opening them up for tourism, conservation and study.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in front of portraits of himself and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Mr. Erdogan’s party has dropped in the polls.

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But Mr. Erdogan’s supporters speak of the building as the third holiest site in Islam, after the Grand Mosque of Mecca and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and insist that once a mosque it should never be unconsecrated. Mr. Erdogan, who comes from a conservative Muslim tradition, has overseen a steady chipping away of the secular rules of the Ataturk republic, with a concerted effort to revive the glories of the Ottoman era.

 

At the end of May, he gave his strongest signal yet on Hagia Sophia, as he opened — remotely, because of the coronavirus — a ceremony and sound-and-light show to commemorate the 567th anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople by the Muslim army of Mehmed II the Conqueror. For the first time in more than 80 years, an imam seated on a carpeted dais before a copy of the Quran recited the verse known as the Conquest surah, which celebrates the Treaty of Hudaibiyah between the people of Mecca and Medina. The recitation upset many. The Foreign Ministry of Greece, which sees itself as the heir to the Byzantine Empire — which was Greek-speaking and Christian — denounced it as unacceptable and a breach of Hagia Sophia’s status as a world heritage site under UNESCO.

The ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, who is the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church from his seat in Istanbul, said the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque would disappoint millions of Christians around the world and would divide Muslims and Christians when it had been a place of worship for both. “We consider it as detrimental,” he said in a sermon last week, “for Hagia Sophia, which, due to its dedication to the Wisdom of God is a point of encounter and a source of fascination for the faithful of both religions, to become, in the 21st century, a cause of confrontation and conflict.” He urged the Turks to honor what he described as their obligation to the world. “The Turkish people have the great responsibility and the highest honor to give prominence to the universality of this exquisite monument,” he said. Mr. Pompeo urged Turkey before the court hearing to respect the diverse traditions and faiths of Turkey’s history and keep Hagia Sophia as a museum accessible to all.

Hagia Sophia is the most visited tourist site in Turkey, with 3.7 million visitors last year.

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Many in Turkey see the entire debate as a political ploy by Mr. Erdogan to remain ahead of his many rivals, especially as former members of his Justice and Development Party have broken away to form their own political parties and threaten to draw away some of his conservative Muslim base. He has made it a nationalist issue, lashing out at Greece for interfering in his country’s affairs and insisting that Turkey was proceeding according to the law. “Is it you managing Turkey or us?” he said. “Turkey has its own institutions.” His nationalist coalition ally Devlet Bahceli weighed in with a speech on the same day: “Hagia Sophia is the conquest Mosque of the Muslim Turkish nation. This truth will not change.”

“This shows that there is something catching fire, something burning in the dynamics of this country,” Mr. Erdogan added. Even a former member of Mr. Erdogan’s cabinet, Ertugrul Gunay, who served as minister of culture for five years, said Mr. Erdogan was making a fanfare over Hagia Sophia only to show he was still master of Istanbul after his electoral loss. “The need to be more visible in Istanbul and to claim ownership of certain rituals about history and religion emerged,” he said in a television interview. “There are multitudes of grand mosques spread throughout Istanbul,” he added in a text message. “This discussion of Hagia Sophia to be converted to a mosque done by the conservatives of Turkey is an old and unnecessary discussion.”

A mosaic panel of Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and Virgin Mary.

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Beyond politics, art historians and conservationists worry that they will lose access for study and research if the monument becomes a working mosque, and tourist companies and city authorities fear that visitors will be deterred from coming. The monument is the most visited tourist site in Turkey, with 3.7 million visitors last year.

“I am more interested in preserving Hagia Sophia as a cultural treasure,” said Zeynep Ahunbay, a conservation architect who has worked on the scientific committee for Hagia Sophia for 25 years. “The best way to preserve and present it is by the museum function.” The greatest worry is what will happen to the incomparable medieval mosaics, among them depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, alongside rare portraits of imperial figures including Emperor Justinian I and Empress Zoe, one of the few women to rule in her own right. The mosaics were whitewashed for the more than five centuries during Ottoman rule — the depiction of the human form being considered idolatry — and were uncovered and restored only after Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum in the 1930s. “We don’t know what will happen to the mosaics and frescos,” said Faruk Pekin, founder of Fest Travel, which specializes in cultural tours and led 80 nighttime tours of Hagia Sophia last year. One of the delights of touring the building at night, he said, was that the dome seems even larger and the gold mosaics gleam more brilliantly in the dim light. Visitors pay double for the nighttime tour, and most of his customers are Turkish, he said. If the museum becomes a mosque, the mosaics will have to be covered during Muslim prayers somehow, including seraphs high up at the base of the dome. Tourists and non-Muslims may be restricted to certain areas, he said. “I still hope it will not happen.”