Devin Terrell Taylor was stopped by Trooper Stokes for a traffic violation. We suspect he was about to be taken to jail for driving with a suspended license in reference to the hit and run accident below. Taylor apparently didn't want to go to jail and began fighting with Trooper Stokes, who ultimately had to draw his weapon and fire a couple of shots to save himself. Taylor ended up Dead Right There on the side of the highway after the lead injection.
We decided to do some research after watching the video of Devin Terrell Taylor's girlfriend telling us what a good boy he was. We won't type it all out, but the screen caps of his criminal history in Sumter County is below. We didn't check surrounding counties.
Okay, he gets busted for pot which is so trivial it shouldn't be a crime to begin with. His second bust is disorderly conduct, which might be anything from a cop having a bad day and him having a big mouth up to and including aggravated menacing or some such. Likely he was under the influence and acting up. His license is suspended twice, once for being drunk and being a minor, a second time for leaving an injury accident.
ReplyDeleteSo he's no choir boy. He attends some kind of multifamily party where people are tearing around on four wheelers and motorcycles and tanking up on beer. The he decides to drive home. His blood was tested at three times the legal limit for alcohol - translation: This guy is hammered.
He gets pulled over. You know how drunk you have to be in order to get pulled over? You have to be cross-eyed drunk and driving like an idiot. Then when he can't pass field sobriety tests he decides to fight.
Hindsight being 20/20, if the arresting officer had four or five large men to help him, the shooting likely wouldn't have happened. The officer didn't have that, so the question becomes one of abuse. How long are you going to let someone physically abuse you, personally, before you put some lead in the air? Now me, I'd suck up one or two punches along with the abrasions and torn up clothing IF I knew for a stone cold fact that the attacker would surrender after that. Since that wasn't the case here, the officer did what I would do and what I do not fault anyone for doing. He ventilated this drunken ass hat, and that's that.
You know what? Screw Taylor. I wouldn't put up with being beaten and I don't expect anyone else to put up with it either. I'm sorry that Taylor's friends and family have to go to a funeral, but if they were keeping an eye on Taylor they would have taken his car keys away from him and told him he couldn't drive drunk and without a license.
The only things that bother me about this whole business is that the State Trooper is going to have to live with one more horrible experience that could have been avoided by responsible human behavior, and that a young man managed to go from being a very petty criminal to fertilizer, and it's likely no one will ever understand just how he got there.