You can reach Rich Tandler by email at WarpathInsiders@comcast.net
As some of you have noticed, the Sean Taylor legal case has not been
discussed much here since it broke early last June. Perhaps such an omission has
been irresponsible journalism on my part, but I had never seen enough about the
details of the case to understand what happened. Believe it or not, I actually
want to be informed about something before I form an opinion on it and, at least
in in articles I've been able to find, the details of what actually happened
have been very sketchy.
That is, in the articles I've been able to find up until today. I found this
New York Times article by one Robert Andrew Powell. I'm not sure if Powell
is a sports reporter or a legal reporter but he is definitely a reporter.
He did some legwork, got access to the case file, interviewed one of the men
involved in the incident and pieced together the best, most complete account to
date of the confrontation that landed Taylor in legal hot water.
The picture painted is disturbing in many respects. I'm going to clip a few
excerpts here, but I don't want to take too much of Powell's work. If you want
to follow the rest of this blog, I'd suggest that you click on the link to
Powell's story and read that and then come back.
Taylor, who had signed a multi million dollar contract a year earlier, was
hanging out with a friend named Michael McFarlane in West Perrine, which Powell
describes as, "a depressed community south of Miami." He brought along
his two new ATV's to cruise the side streets and the lawns of the housing
projects. At the end of the day, Taylor left them parked in McFarlane's lawn
even though he didn't stay at his house.
The next morning the ATV's were gone. Yes, this just in, if you leave
expensive items unsecured in housing projects overnight, they just might get
stolen. To compound the stupidity, instead of calling the police Taylor,
McFarlane and another unidentified man jumped into Taylor's truck and another
car to cruise the neighborhood to try to find the vehicles.
For some reason they confronted a man named Ryan Hill, who was hanging out in
the neighborhood with some friends and demanded to know where the ATV's were.
Hill denied knowing where they were and that's when the confrontation started.
Powell interviewed Hill for this story:
"He (Taylor) started talking nasty and stuff, talking about how: 'The
police can't touch me. I own this town,' " Hill, 22, said in an interview
on the stoop outside his mother's public-housing apartment in West Perrine,
where he lives with her, a brother and a sister.
According to Hill and other witnesses, Taylor exited his truck, pulled a
gun out of his waistband and pointed it at Hill and a couple of his friends.
Witnesses said another man pulled out an M-16 and demanded that Hill return
Taylor's A.T.V.'s. When Hill denied stealing the vehicles, Taylor and the
other man left in their cars. Both vowed to return and kill everyone present,
according to depositions from Hill and other witnesses.
Obviously, if this is true, Taylor committed a crime here in pointing a gun
at people and by threatening to kill them. He and the other men then left and
further compounded the already compounded stupidity and bad judgment by
returning with a "posse". A fistfight evidently started by Taylor
ensued and ended when Hill and his group fled. So now we have another crime
committed by Taylor in starting a fight.
As if all of this wasn't strange enough, there was one final twist. Taylor drove
his GMC Yukon back to McFarlane's house, parked it in front, and went
inside.
A silver car pulled up. Hands poked out of the car's windows. From inside
the house, McFarlane noticed guns and dived to the floor, according to
depositions given by witnesses to Taylor's lawyers.
The Yukon was struck at least 15 times, and the police recovered 27 bullet
cases, according to the police report.
Taylor was not at the house when police arrived. He turned himself in to
police three days later to face one count of felony assault and one count of
battery. In January, Dade County DA Michael Grieco, a/k/a DJ Dirty Sanchez,
filed two additional felony assault charges. Since there was a gun involved in
the assault cases they each carry a mandatory minimum of three years in jail if
Taylor is convicted of them.
With the warning that I'm not a lawyer and not intimately familiar with what
goes on every day in the housing projects near Miami or elsewhere, let me take a
stab a summing this up. Two vehicles costing thousands of dollars each were
stolen. Two men, one of them Taylor, drew guns and made threats. A fight
involving a "posse" and Hill's group of friends broke out. A car
filled with men drive by and with multiple guns and apparent disregard for the
safety of whoever was in McFarlane's house or any bystanders who may have been
present unloaded a couple of clips of bullets into Taylor's truck.
And in all of this Sean Taylor, the one whose ATV's were stolen and whose
truck was shot up, is the only one charged with a crime. Isn't it fair to say
that he was the victim of a couple of crimes himself? That doesn't excuse the
crimes, of course, but if this was such an outrageous happening that someone who
didn't fire a single shot is facing nine years in the slammer for it, what about
his co-conspirators? What about whoever stole the ATV's valued at thousands of
dollars? What about the ones who did the drive by?
It's important to note two other points here, points that in many cases would
be causes for leniency when it came to considering a sentence for a defendant.
First, there doesn't seem to be any premeditation on Taylor's part; whatever
crimes were ones committed in the heat of the moment. Second, it's very
important to note that when he returned after making the death threats, Taylor
was not armed.
One does not have to be a Redskins homer or a skeptic to think that this
reeks of a case of a publicity-hungry DA going after the only famous person
involved in the whole mess. We do know that the Grieco was using press clippings
from the case to promote his second career as the above-mentioned DJ Dirty
Sanchez. Apparently, going after some guy named Hill doesn't generate enough pub
to make it worth the additional time. Might cut into the clubbing time, don't ya
know.
When we use the term "celebrity justice" it usually is in reference
to a case where a famous person gets a slap on the wrist for a crime that would
have brought the full hammer of justice down on us average folks. In this case
with Sean Taylor, we seem to have the mirror image of that with very serious
charges being brought for an incident that, while it calls for legal action,
does not seem to be serious enough to warrant the possibility of such a severe
penalty.
Rich Tandler is the author of The Redskins From A to Z, Volume 2: The
Games. This unique book has an account of every game that the Redskins
played from the time they moved to Washington in 1937 through the 2001 season.
To get details on the book and ordering information, go to http://www.RedskinsGames.com
