GEORGETOWN — A Charleston man who was falsely accused of Brittanee Drexel’s kidnapping and murder as a teenager is now suing the federal government.
Timothy Da'Shaun Taylor Jr. is suing for abuse of process and emotional distress after he and his father, Shaun Taylor, were publicly named as suspects by the FBI in 2016 based solely on the accusations of a jailhouse informant. The lawsuit is to be filed March 26 in federal court, according to a press release from his law firm. The lawsuit has yet to officially appear in the federal court online docket.
Specifically, Timothy Taylor was accused of sexually assaulting 17-year-old Drexel; his father was accused of shooting her and dumping her body into an alligator pit.
Timothy Taylor contends the FBI knew they did not have any evidence linking him and his father to the crime, besides the informant's accusations. Taylor lived with his family in McClellanville, just south of Georgetown. When Drexel was last seen alive in Myrtle Beach in 2009, the two were visiting Edisto Island.
"Timothy and his family were targeted and destroyed by the FBI while the real killer, whose guilt was obvious, walked free," said Timothy Taylor's attorney, Ryan McKaig, referring to Raymond Moody — the man who pleaded guilty to Drexel's kidnapping, rape and murder in 2022.
Taylor alleges the FBI arrested him without probable cause while not considering or investigating Moody, who had a history of sexual crimes against minors and who had evaded parole before Drexel disappeared.
Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor Jr. (left) joins his family in the audience for the hearing of Raymond Moody at the Georgetown County Judicial Center in Georgetown on Wednesday, October 19, 2022.
Taylor, who is Black, alleges he became the third generation of men in his family to be falsely arrested for "kidnapping innocent White women," and that his family has dealt with years of harassment, death threats and lost opportunities after being prosecuted in the court of public opinion.
Two of his uncles were falsely arrested for the unsolved North Charleston murder of Shannon McConaughey in 1998. His father was falsely arrested for an attempted kidnapping in Myrtle Beach just 15 months after Drexel disappeared, per the complaint.
And Taylor has accused the FBI of not retracting its public accusation against him and his father until Moody's guilty plea in 2022. The FBI had publicly marked him and his father as primary suspects in Drexel's case in 2016, and that accusation had remained even though the two were allegedly ruled out as suspects by 2018.
McKaig said the suit is meant to share the true story behind what happened during the FBI's investigation, and his client hopes to hold the FBI accountable for the emotional distress his family endured in the six years leading up to Moody's arrest.
"No amount of money can undo the damage the government caused, but we should demand accountability from the people charged with upholding the law," McKaig said. "If the FBI can do this to the Taylor's and just walk away, they can do it to you and your family. That's not justice, and the American people deserve better."
The FBI office in Columbia declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The accusations begin
Drexel, 17, of Chili, N.Y., disappeared while on a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach in 2009. She was last seen alive at the Blue Water Resort in Myrtle Beach.
Moody, a registered sex offender, kidnapped Drexel and drove to a campsite at Pole Yard Boat Landing, a spot near the North Santee River south of Georgetown where he liked to fish.
After smoking marijuana, Moody confessed to police that he hoped to have consensual sex with Drexel, prosecutors said. When she resisted, he assaulted her. Moody said he strangled Drexel and hid her body. After 13 years, Drexel's body was found in May 2022 in a four-foot grave 10 miles north of the boat landing.
On April 25, 2009, about three hours and 40 minutes away from Myrtle Beach, Timothy Taylor, then 16, and his father were attending a car show in Edisto Island. The two were passionate about cars, with Shaun Taylor owning a wrecker service. They attended the festival with some cousins and friends.
When they were eventually questioned, Timothy Taylor and Shaun Taylor told police about the car show, and detectives verified their alibis.
But Timothy Taylor said the local police baselessly focused on his family after receiving a tip that Shaun Taylor was in Myrtle Beach the same weekend as Drexel. Also, phone records showed that Drexel's cell phone's last pings connected to the tower across from their home. The pings, though, were faint and unreliable as evidence due to existing technology.
Taylor alleges his family was also targeted by police in Drexel's case because his uncles, Randall and Jacob Taylor, were also falsely arrested in 1998 for kidnapping and murder in another high-profile case in the Palmetto State.
Shannon McConaughey, of Charleston, disappeared 11 years earlier after leaving a Cracker Barrel restaurant in North Charleston. She was shot to death, and her body was found near her burned car in a field near McClellanville. Investigators looked for connections between Drexel's case and the one of McConaughey.
Like Taylor, Randall also had been accused solely based on a jailhouse informant's accusations.
Then, 15 months after Drexel disappeared, his father was falsely arrested for a Myrtle Beach attempted kidnapping. A White woman had falsely identified Shaun Taylor as the ringleader of the crime, even though he was at a McDonald's in Conway at the time. No other evidence connected him to the scene.
Timothy Taylor claims this baseless targeting of his family by local police in 2011 caused the investigation task force to not retrieve necessary cell tower data before it was deleted after one year.
Taylor claims SLED Agent Kin McKenzie, who was assigned to the case soon after his father's false arrest, received Moody's file in 2011. The file was flagged for its "very disturbing" contents, making McKenzie believe that Moody was the likely killer.
Georgetown County Detective Phil Hanna questioned Moody's girlfriend Angel Vause, and she confirmed those suspicions. Police obtained a warrant to place a GPS tracker on his vehicle and raided the Sunset Lodge room where Moody had been staying at the time of Drexel's disappearance. But police reportedly lacked sufficient evidence to make an arrest, per the complaint.
'The FBI thought it knew better'
Taylor claims that when the FBI got involved, it did not come to the same conclusion about Moody as local police. The FBI still considered Timothy Taylor a suspect, even though he had a verified alibi and weighed about as much as Drexel at the time. Taylor also only had one arm after he lost his left one in a childhood accident.
Taylor has accused the FBI of ignoring the evidence that strongly suggested his innocence and Moody's guilt and thinking it knew better than local detectives.
"As the premiere law enforcement agency in the world, the Bureau and its agents were confident that they could see things and do things that local police just couldn’t," per the complaint. "(The FBI) had taken down Dillinger, Capone, Gotti and the Unabomber. Now it was here to get Timothy Taylor."
The FBI held a press conference in McClellanville, where they offered a $25,000 reward for information. Then, the FBI seized on an accusation from Taquan Brown, who was serving a 25-year state prison sentence for manslaughter.
Brown accused Timothy Taylor of sexually assaulting Drexel and his father of shooting her and feeding her to alligators. The FBI agents reportedly went by Brown's accusations alone while not finding any other supporting evidence.
"The (FBI) agents found Brown’s story especially compelling, they said, because it matched some of the local gossip and speculation they’d heard," per the complaint. "The agents were fully convinced that they had solved the case ... All they had to do now was get some leverage on one of the people involved, bring all their weight to bear on him and watch him rat on all the others."
In an attempt to squeeze Timothy Taylor for details about the Drexel case, they pursued federal charges in a 2011 robbery of a McDonald's restaurant in Mount Pleasant — a crime for which Taylor had already served a probationary sentence after pleading guilty in state court.
Because he’d already admitted to the crime in state court, his lawyers said he was forced to also plead guilty to the federal charges.
Taylor pleaded guilty in 2019 in the federal case, receiving three years’ probation in addition to the time he had served in jail, court records show.
After Timothy Taylor's family held a press conference in May 2022 following Moody's surrender to police, U.S. District Court Judge David C. Norton signed an order terminating Timothy Taylor Jr.'s probation term "in the interest of justice." Taylor's probation was set to expire July 6, 2022.
FBI agents also reportedly told Drexel's parents about how Timothy and Sean Taylor supposedly killed their daughter.
"The Drexels claim that the agents did not equivocate," per the complaint. "This was what really happened to Brittanee, they said. Brittanee’s parents assumed, as would anyone, that the FBI would never say something like that if they weren’t certain that it was true."
Taylor claims the FBI told the public that they had evidence against Taylor that they did not have, and they ignored his alibi to target and prosecute him in the court of public opinion.
The FBI claimed that Timothy Taylor was being accused of kidnapping, human trafficking and murder, ignoring his alibi from that night, his one arm and his size at the time, among other factors.
Taylor is accusing the FBI of abuse of process because he claims the FBI arrested him without ever telling him that he was arrested for petty robbery, and he claims the arrest deeply and negatively impacted him and his family.
"The FBI’s calculated strategy to abuse the criminal process had consequences and proximately caused Timothy to suffer damages that are as profound as they are hard to even comprehend," per the complaint.
Taylor is suing for damages and attorney's fees.
