Son sentenced to 22 years, 8 months to life in Crenshaw murder case
Wayne Taylor III was convicted of second-degree murder for killing and dismembering his father Wayne Taylor Jr. in 2007.
Combing through burned debris, firefighters at a vacant Crenshaw storefront made a gruesome discovery: the charred hands, feet and head of a man stuffed inside a small refrigerator.
The remains belonged to Wayne Taylor Jr., 65, a long-retired computer programmer whose family had reported him missing a week earlier.
As Los Angeles Police homicide detectives delved deeper into the victim's background, they say they discovered that Taylor had spent the final few weeks of his life living in fear of his increasingly erratic and violent adult son, Wayne "Trea" Taylor III.
The elder Taylor told others that his son had recently assaulted him, leaving him with black eyes and a broken nose. He told his landlord that his son had threatened to kill him if he called police. And in what detectives described as part of his final entry in a journal, Taylor wrote: "Trea called and asked if I wanted to come out and talk with him. I told him no."
In a downtown L.A. courtroom Monday, Superior Court Judge Stephen A. Marcus sentenced the younger Taylor to 22 years and eight months to life in prison for the murder of his father, saying the crime involved "a high degree of cruelty."
"I have to conclude that this defendant snapped in this situation . . . because there's no other explanation for this level of violence," Marcus said.
During an at-times bizarre sentencing hearing, Taylor, 38, remained in a nearby cell after refusing to enter the courtroom. At one point, Marcus visited his cell in an effort to persuade him to attend his sentencing. The judge said Taylor would not respond and instead invoked the name of Haile Selassie, the late Ethiopian emperor whom Rastafarians worship as an incarnation of God.
An audio system was set up to allow Taylor to hear the proceeding in his cell. But he could be heard chanting and singing loudly throughout the 45-minute hearing.
Friends and relatives sent the judge letters pleading for leniency, noting that Taylor had been a successful student at Morehouse College in Georgia and a devoted member of a local church. Several described him as a loving father who helped care around the clock for a daughter born prematurely and who died a day short of her first birthday in June 2006.
"I believe he deserves to have another chance," his mother, Fannie Taylor, told the judge. She had been divorced from the victim since 1978.
