In 4 days, violent crime has claimed the lives of 2 men in the Breonna Taylor case

One was included on the warrant leading to the fateful raid; the other was the leader of the ensuing protest movement; both incidents point up the serious problem with the area’s murder rate

PHOTO: This was a photo taken from the mobile phones of Kenneth Walker and Breonna Taylor, shared between them during their relationship. NOTE: Photographing one’s self with a weapon is not an admission of guilt or evidence of illegal activity. Nor is it any excuse, justification or reason why someone may have deserved to die in police custody. The photograph is ONLY being used here to show that the media narrative about Breonna Taylor is decidedly incomplete.

LOUISVILLE — Two young men connected in some way to the Breonna Taylor case have died within four days of each other, both shot and killed in different areas of Louisville.

Adrian Walker, 28, was shot and killed in the early afternoon of Nov. 19, a mere two blocks away from the “trap house” where he and his partner, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover stashed drugs, money and guns — a house that was raided in the same March 13 operation as was Taylor’s apartment. The place where Walker was killed is part of the most troubled area of Louisville, the West End, in the Russell neighborhood. Police reportedly do not have a suspect in the killing.

He was a key figure in the Taylor case, contacted by her on behalf of Glover when he was in custody in January of this year. According to the leaked police file from the case, Glover called Taylor from jail Jan. 3 and told her to call Walker and find out where his money was. Shortly after, Taylor bailed Glover out of jail. The evidence file, with numerous jail phone calls and a paper trail, shows that Taylor was a key player in Glover’s drug operation — holding thousands of dollars for him and stashing it at a still-undisclosed location. The victim, Adrian Walker, had been listed on the police warrant along with Glover and Breonna Taylor for that fateful raid.

Evidence from the Louisville Police Departmet file on the Breonna Taylor investigation.

Not only was Taylor knee deep in his operation, but three weeks after they were seen together on social media, she began dating another man, Kenneth Walker, who had no criminal record. Nevertheless, according to photographic evidence on his mobile phone (leaked from the police file), he was selling pills and weed and had an affinity for guns, including an AR-15, and the 9 mm Glock he used to defend himself when police entered the apartment near the witching hour.

Adrian Walker of Louisville was shot and killed Thursday Nov. 19 in broad daylight in the same neighborhood that he and Breonna’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover frequented to stash drugs, money and weapons in an abandoned house. No suspects have been arrested in Walker’s killing. He is no relation to Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker.

Adrian Walker, no relation to Kenneth, was a suspect in that probe, and he worked directly with Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover. In September, Glover signed a plea bargain resulting from the same narcotics probe that was part of the raid at three different Louisville locations in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, and is currently serving jail time.

Yet as many articles as have been written about Taylor’s tragic death, most of them state that Taylor was not involved in “any criminal activity,” and even that police went to the wrong door. This lie perpetuates to this day, and it’s a big part of why Louisville has seen nearly 200 days of protest against police action leading to her death.

Scrutiny into Breonna Taylor originated in December 2016, when a body was found in a car she had rented. In fact according to local news at the time, Fernandez Bowman was shot and killed while driving that car. Bowman’s brother, Demarius, has been listed by detectives as a co-conspirator with Glover, but retrospective news reports post-police shooting make a lot of effort to separate Taylor from that car, saying she allowed her boyfriend to use it — which may be true. It just seemed like a deliberate effort to distance her from Fernandez Bowman.

The web site Heavy dot com quoted The New York Times: “Glover told investigators that he gave Bowman the keys because Bowman needed to “run an errand.” Also found in the car were “three baggies of drugs,” according to The Times.

“Investigators noted that they believed Ms. Taylor had no knowledge of the killing,” The Times reported. Investigators asked Taylor if she was involved in drug deals, according to The Times, an allegation she denied. Taylor also denied knowing Bowman, reported WKYT in August 2020.”

On Monday (Nov. 23), a young leader in the protest movement demanding justice for Breonna Taylor was shot and killed Monday by an unknown assailant, the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal reported.

Hamza “Travis” Nagdy, 21, was shot and fatally wounded in the St. Joseph neighborhood just south of downtown Louisville. He later died of his wounds at the University of Louisville hospital.

Travis Nagdy.

Vigils were held Monday night for the charismatic Travis, even as police have released no information about what led to his death or any suspect.

The Courier-Journal article called Nagdy “a new symbol of gun violence.” Independent reporter Antonio Taylor was quoted lower in the story as echoing the sentiment that he is a symbol of “the violence that’s going on.”

“What I'm hoping is he will become a symbol of the violence that's going on, and people will finally give it the attention that we need to be giving to this record number of homicides in our city. ...We're just hoping that he will become a symbol of what great lives we are going to lose if we don't wrap a movement around what's going on."

The importance of the killings of young black Americans by police, and the killings of young black Americans in violent crimes, are two sides of the same coin. Yet media accounts of the last five years focus on the much rarer circumstances of unarmed citizens being killed by police, while ignoring the very real and debilitating homicides that occur — sadly in a parallel universe where it’s deemed not important to mention the much greater problem (statistically).

Perhaps the proximity of these crimes to each other will create an effect that serves to usher in an appreciation for complete facts — that while young black men die at a disproportionate ratio compared with their percentage of the population, the same is true for crimes committed, unemployment, poverty, poor education — all the things that for some reason corporate media and the Democratic party ignore for fear of being “racist.” As a journalist, I never saw the statistics on young black Americans to be indicative of anything wrong with them; in fact, I saw it more as the betrayal by our leaders of this population. The only time most white Americans see what it’s really like to live “downtown” or “South Central” or “West End” or “South Side” or “Swatts” is when they turn on their local TV news and see police tape and the pictures of fallen young black Americans and Hispanics. The sadness dissipates, and they move on. But those communities cannot just move on. They see more death and destruction than the majority of white families.

It is important to note that the raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment was motivated out of a police probe of an uptick in drug-related violent crimes. Evidence showed she was actively involved in the drug ring, despite the lack of evidence collected when her apartment was locked down after the botched raid.

It is irresponsible and profoundly disingenuous for corporate media as a whole to reduce their reporting of any tragic death as merely a punchline in the four-year election cycle. The “symbols of gun violence,” and “high school student caught in the crossfire” deserve the complete facts.

The complete facts show that young black men do suffer a disproportionate amount of violence — homicide by criminals — and then in a very very small percentage, police shootings which also affect hundreds of young white men and women.

And in the whitest of West LA suburbs, you have people who hang out “BLM” signs thinking they’re taking a difficult stand to highlight something the rest of America somehow doesn’t care about. All they’re doing is pathetic virtue signaling, because they remain ignorant of the bulk of the carnage of black and brown citizens — by design. It’s by design because the coverage is not geared toward solutions; it’s geared toward blame and division.

When you realize there’s no one to blame except the leaders who’ve ignored these citizens while exploiting their suffering, there is the beginning of true compassion.

That is the beginning of actually being able to articulate where all black lives matter: in the schools, and in an even playing field entrepreneurial opportunities, education and jobs.

So if wealthy America is going to continue to eat up the victim narrative from their privileged perches, supporting media that only serve to divide us, I have one suggestion: that we stop patronizing the publications who have been derelict in bringing the complete picture to the American people. And incredibly so; after all, why would anyone looking at the complete picture of the plight of the working class ever judge the ones being kept down? It’s an important question that I haven’t fully found the answer to.

Further reading:
2016: Louisville PD proposed millions in overtime pay to target high-crime areas
2019: Three LPD officers sentenced to probation for stealing overtime pay

Parkland neighborhood in West Louisville got a D- in violent crime in 2016 from the FBI crime statistics database.