how do u breathe… hrs b4 ppl u know r innocent are murdered❓‼️‼️‼️
my brother, the olympian, offered:
I take comfort in knowing that Raheem is buoyed by his faith, and has been since my first message with him. The knowledge that this will give him inner peace also gives me a semblance of peace, albeit mitigated by the existential horror of this reality.
pause. breathe 🎶🎶🎶
i wonder… what song on this playlist speaks to Raheem? to Deja? ’cause it just jumped out at me…
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO2IkrUA?si=xzAjGcbyQgKmtlownHDomA
….
That Taylor made this trip is undisputed; what it means depends on who you believe. According to the state of Missouri, the trip was evidence that Taylor, then 40, was fleeing St. Louis after brutally murdering his 28-year-old girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three young children. According to Taylor, the trip was for business, but with a twist: He was planning to meet his 13-year-old daughter, Deja, for the first time. During the visit, both Deja and her mother, Taylor’s former girlfriend, say that Taylor called Rowe in St. Louis and put Deja on the phone to chat with one of Rowe’s daughters. In other words, in the days after Taylor boarded that westbound flight, Rowe and her children were very much alive.
Despite the discrepancy, Taylor was arrested two weeks later. He was tried on four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He has always maintained his innocence, arguing that police fixated on him as a suspect and ignored a compelling alibi supported by witness statements in favor of a theory in which he slaughtered his loved ones and then stayed at the crime scene for days before flying to California. The state’s case rested on Taylor’s brother, Perry, who was relentlessly harassed by police until he implicated his brother in the crime — and who recanted his statements long before Taylor’s 2008 trial. The state also relied on testimony from a medical examiner who changed his time-of-death estimate dramatically to support the state’s version of events.
“All they wanted was SOMEBODY to heap these crimes on,” Taylor wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Even if it was the wrong SOMEBODY.”
….
Police quickly latched on to Leonard Taylor, Rowe’s live-in boyfriend, as their main suspect. The night the bodies were found, Gerjuan asked the cops whether Taylor was inside the house, and police reports indicate that various wmembers of Rowe’s family said that her relationship with Taylor was not without its struggles.
Taylor had a criminal record and a history of violence. He’d done time in California for rape and was accused in 2000 of raping his 16-year-old stepdaughter. He was also a seasoned drug dealer who trafficked cocaine across the country, amassing a string of aliases and fraudulent IDs. Still, the state never offered a cogent motive to explain the vicious and cold-blooded crime.
Taylor had overlapping intimate relationships that followed the path of his illicit business dealings, which earned him the nickname “Cass” — short for Casanova. While Taylor was involved with Rowe, he also had a wife in California and a girlfriend in Kentucky.
Among his past partners was Mia Perry, Deja’s mother, who he became involved with in the late 1980s. In 1991, the same year that Deja was born, Taylor was popped for drug dealing and sentenced to time in federal prison; he never got to meet his baby daughter. While inside, Taylor told the Kansas City Star, he “hooked up with some cats that were on some corporate stuff, doing corporate check fraud.” Upon his release, Taylor began a short-lived career in white-collar crime, which landed him in Missouri state prison.
Rowe, the younger sister of Taylor’s former neighbor in St. Louis, visited him often while he was incarcerated. When he was released in 2002, Taylor re-upped his cross-country drug trade, staying with Rowe when he was in town. In the summer of 2004, Taylor, Rowe, and the kids moved into the house in Jennings. Rowe had Taylor’s name tattooed on her arm. Around the home, there were pictures of the smiling couple and love notes Rowe had written.
The move was a relief, according to Taylor, because he’d recently had a drug deal go bad with the notoriously violent Gangster Disciples, who operated in St. Louis and southern Illinois. Meanwhile, he’d also gotten a lead on his long-lost daughter, Deja, whom he ultimately tracked down in California just days after Thanksgiving.
During their reunion, Taylor called back home to St. Louis to share the news with Rowe. Taylor had plans to bring Deja out to St. Louis and wanted her to chat with Rowe and 10-year-old Alexus. The following Monday, Taylor boarded a Greyhound bus carrying a kilo of cocaine and headed back east on business, he told the KC Star. On December 9, Taylor was arrested in Kentucky for the murders of Rowe and her children.
….
it’s deep…. read for urself.
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/05/missouri-leonard-raheem-taylor-execution/
and ponder. and still conclude: DEATH IS NOT JUSTICE
Ukuthula/UBUNTU
tues feb 7 2023 6a cSt mgy REmbr… G is, as G can only BE. GOOD
aché
ponder on this 