That didn't make the announcement any easier to take.
"This was not a surprise for us, and that's the problem," said Ashlee Phillips, a 28-year-old businesswoman who just opened her own thrift shop in Louisville. "We may say 'we're not surprised,' but that doesn't mean that it's not traumatic."
Thousands of Black Americans are voicing their frustration, anger and angst on social media with the tag #sickandtired, which has come out several times this year after the controversial deaths of Black men and women. And they're sick and tired of having to use it.
Phillips was born and raised in Louisville and says her city has been living Taylor's story since March 13, when the 26-year-old EMT and aspiring nurse was shot and killed in her apartment by police serving a no-knock warrant.
"A lot of us are realizing how different it is when it happens to where you're from, when it happens on streets that you drive down all the time," she said. "So it's not even following. It's actually being immersed in it, it's actually living it, it is actually feeling it and feeling the impact on it."
On Wednesday, more than six months after Taylor was killed, a grand jury indicted fired detective Brett Hankison on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment because he allegedly fired blindly through Taylor's window and door, sending bullets into a neighboring apartment. The other two officers were not charged.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove were "justified in their use of force" because Taylor's boyfriend fired at officers first.
The FBI has said it is conducting a separate investigation.
They feel their lives are 'undervalued'
Taylor's family, their supporters and protesters around the country have called the charges inadequate because they don't address her death.
"It's just a slap in the face to her family, to her legacy," said Aeriel Murphy-Leonard, a materials science engineer who's finishing up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "And then as a Black woman, just knowing that your life is so undervalued, you know, like, you are really, so considered less than a human being."
Murphy-Leonard, 30, is about to start a new position as an assistant professor at Ohio State University. She said she relates to Taylor as a young Black woman and is sad that she was robbed of a chance to achieve her dreams for the future.
The disappointment she feels is a combination of anger and hurt for Taylor's family, her boyfriend and all the people who loved her, as well as anger at a system that she says is designed to hold Black people down.
"It's exhausting to wake up every day and have to exist in a space that is that is created for you to fail, it's created for you to go to jail, it's created for you to not have equitable access to resources," she said. "It's literally created to keep you down, and to have to fight that every day is just exhausting."
Home should be a safe place
Murphy-Leonard said she's never had a run-in with
