A Sculpture Honoring Breonna Taylor Smashed To Pieces In Downtown Oakland
A sculpture honoring Breonna Taylor was smashed to pieces over the weekend, just two weeks after it was installed downtown, prompting police to launch a vandalism investigation.
Sculptor and Oakland resident Leo Carson
said he made the sculpture to honor the legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its influences on contemporary political art. Carson said he was “super upset” about the vandalism and calls the incident an act of “racist aggression” against Taylor, a figure that moved millions of people across the country to protest police brutality and call for defunding the police.
“I’ve put in hours and hours of my work and built it by hand,” Carson said. “Before the pandemic, I was a waiter so I paid for this out of my own pocket. It wasn’t cheap and it was incredibly hurtful personally. But it was also an attack on Breonna Taylor and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is racist aggression,” Mercury News quotes. Carson went on to tell CBS Los Angeles that he does not believe the vandalism was random: “Looks like they hit it with a baseball bat along the back.”
“I don’t think there’s a single person in Oakland who doesn’t know who Breonna Taylor is, and I don’t think you attack a sculpture like that by accident,” he said. “And I think that it was an act of racism and an act of aggression and intimidation.”
As we previously reported, Taylor was a Kentucky woman killed during a botched police raid earlier this year. In a statement, the Oakland police said it was aware of the crime. “The Oakland Police Department is aware of the incident regarding the vandalism of a bust honoring Breonna Taylor,” the statement read. “A report has been filed and the incident is under investigation.”
Carson now plans to rebuild the bust, and has started a GoFundMe page to raise money to recast the statue in bronze. As of Sunday afternoon, the GoFundMe page had raised $3,370 from 73 donors, giving between $10 and $200 each.
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