The Curious Case of Travis Nagdy

A little before 12:30 a.m. on Monday, November 23, a young activist named Hamza “Travis” Nagdy was shot to death in Louisville. A number of news reports stated that he had been shot “in a carjacking.” His cause célèbre was leading protests in the wake of the decision of a grand jury not to indict the police officers who fatally shot Breonna Taylor while in the course of serving a warrant.

Apparently Nagdy bought into the narrative that was spun around Taylor after her death: She was an EMT, a first responder, an angel in human form who materialized when people were in danger of dying and who saved their lives. Bungling police, looking for her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend, burst into her apartment and shot her to death as she lay asleep in bed.

But reality differs from the parroted narrative: Taylor was no longer an EMT; after finishing her training, she was an EMT for only about five months before she quit, her personnel file stating that she was ineligible for rehire. This usually occurs when someone messes up and is given the option of resigning instead of being fired. Her EMT license had since expired, and she was actually working as a medical technician for a couple of hospitals. 14K Gold Whiskey Barre... Buy New $249.00 (as of 04:15 UTC - Details)

Taylor is also portrayed as an innocent naïf who unwittingly took up with a man she later found out to be a drug dealer, at which time she terminated the relationship. Not so. Early in her relationship with Jamarcus Glover, Glover asked her to rent a car and let him use it. The car was later found with a dead man in it who had been shot eight times; also found in the car were drugs and Taylor’s car rental paperwork. But Taylor didn’t take the hint. She continued seeing Glover, even bailing him out of jail and handling money for him. On recorded jail phone conversations with Glover, she alluded to “the trap,” drug-dealer lingo for a house from which the drugs are dealt. It was probably her continuing dalliance with Glover that put her on the LMPD radar screen.

The raid on Taylor’s apartment was not a mistake; the warrant was for more than one residence, and Taylor’s residence and Taylor herself were named in the warrant. When the police breached the door, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, not knowing it was the police, fired a “warning shot,” which struck one of the officers in the thigh. The officers returned fire, and Taylor—up on her feet in the hallway with Walker—was fatally struck by the return fire. It is interesting to note that although Taylor and Walker were both in the hallway, Taylor was hit six times, while Walker was unscathed. Had Taylor perhaps been utilized as a human shield?

At any rate, the grand jury correctly determined that the two police officers who shot Taylor had not committed any criminal act by returning fire when they had been fired upon. (A third officer whose wild shots through a patio door and a window had penetrated into another apartment was appropriately charged with wanton endangerment.) Had Taylor ditched Glover immediately after the dead-man-in-the -rental-car escapade, she probably would have been in the clear. Blood Stone Solid 925 ... Buy New $59.99 (as of 04:15 UTC - Details)

Although Taylor’s death was certainly a tragedy, it was not the egregious miscarriage of justice the pushers of the narrative want it to be. Yet Nagdy—a self-proclaimed uneducated felon—seems to have made it his life’s work to keep stirring that pot.

Certain elements of Nagdy’s own death raise questions. In carjackings, a description of the vehicle is usually given so the vehicle can be spotted and the perpetrators apprehended if they’re still driving around in it. Yet in all the accounts of Nagdy’s death that mention a carjacking, not one single description of a vehicle is ever given. This is very strange. Wouldn’t witnesses to a carjacking be able to give some kind of description of the vehicle? Wouldn’t someone who knew Nagdy know what kind of vehicle he drove or whose vehicle he had borrowed? Also, wouldn’t witnesses be able to give a description of the carjackers? Could it be that a description of the carjackers might prove to be an embarrassment to the narrative? This tantalizing little mystery has piqued my curiosity, and I eagerly await its resolution.