SPRINGFIELD — The man with a slight limp heard footsteps crunching in the snow behind him as he made his way home through a Liberty Heights neighborhood on a raw, drizzly Sunday morning.
He stopped to let the second man pass, always self-conscious about holding people up, he told police on Jan. 9.
“You straight?” the stranger asked, before he suddenly spun around and jabbed a knife three times at the collarbone of the man who had just paid him a kindness. The blade didn’t penetrate the man’s heavy wool coat. He managed to get away and dialed 911.
That call touched off the city’s first, fatal police-involved shooting in eight years. Thirteen minutes after the man’s appeal to police, 23-year-old Orlando Taylor III lay dying in the roadway near his home on Genesee Street as his grandmother stood watching.
Taylor had slashed responding patrolman Arjel Falcon in the face with the same knife, then rushed him a second time in the street as Falcon and his partner, patrolman Christopher Roberts, repeatedly ordered Taylor to drop the weapon. Falcon fired twice, hitting Taylor in the torso and neck.
Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni released police body-worn camera footage today, along with a trove of materials including witness statements, police narratives, the audio and a transcript of the 911 call from the man who first encountered Taylor, autopsy, toxicology and ballistics reports and more. Gulluni gathered it all to conduct an investigation into the shooting under intense scrutiny from the public, Taylor’s family and community civil rights activists.
Was it justified or did the evidence reveal another example of excessive police force against a Black man that has played out in urban centers across the country?
During a press briefing Friday afternoon, Gulluni said that while Taylor’s death was tragic, Falcon and Roberts acted professionally and in self-defense after Taylor initiated lethal force against the officer.
“They had the right, and really, frankly it was necessary for them to respond with their own deadly force,” Gulluni told reporters.
The body-worn camera footage shows the harrowing sights and sounds of the confrontation that played out over a matter of minutes:
Taylor lunging at Falcon and cutting him just below his ear as soon as officers approached. Falcon’s hands spattered with his own blood as he trains his gun on Taylor. Taylor’s grandmother screaming at police not to shoot her grandson because “something is wrong with him.” Taylor initially running from police — then doubling back as officers yelled at him to drop the weapon and swiftly closing the distance between him and Falcon to several feet with a pocket knife raised high.
Two shots ringing out from Falcon’s gun. Taylor’s body jerking and crumpling to the ground in a snowbank dirtied by pollution and empty liquor bottles. Taylor’s grandmother, Earlene Victoria Taylor, shrieking louder and louder as she rushes from her porch to her grandson, whom she had raised. The death rattle gurgling from his mouth as his throat and lungs filled with his own blood.
“Shots fired, shots fired! Officer Falcon, shots fired!” Falcon calls over the police radio, then sprints back to his cruiser to retrieve a medical bag, his breath coming in heaves. Roberts frantically begins CPR on Taylor and uses an automated machine to administer chest compressions.
“Press, press, press, press,” the machine barks. Roberts audibly counts to 30 in each cycle.
“I’m losing a lot of blood,” Falcon tells fellow officers who arrive at the scene moments later. “I need two ambulances — one for me and one for the suspect,” he calls over the radio.
Taylor was loaded into an ambulance, but died. Falcon’s colleagues got him into a cruiser to rush him to a hospital as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Falcon required surgery as the stab wound narrowly missed the carotid artery in his neck, police have said.
Initially pleading with officers, Earlene Taylor became increasingly angry and overwrought as the minutes ticked by, the video footage shows.
“He’s a f---ing kid, mother------, “You could have shot him in the leg. You didn’t have to kill my baby,” she yelled.
An autopsy report made public by Gulluni’s office ruled Taylor’s cause of death as a gunshot wound to the neck. The manner of death was listed as “homicide (shot by police).”
A toxicology report detected no drugs in Taylor’s system, according to the records. Earlene Taylor previously told reporters she had been concerned about her grandson’s mental health since he was a high school student.
She called a crisis team from Behavioral Health Network three days before the shooting in an attempt to get him help, she said. Clinicians passed because the man hadn’t caused himself or anyone any harm at that time.
“You can’t wait to shoot? You can’t wait to shoot? We been asking for help,” Earlene Taylor shouted at police on Jan. 9.
The unidentified victim who made the 911 call and later provided a statement to investigators said he had a “walking impediment” and had never seen Taylor before in his life, according to his recorded interview. A woman who lives nearby provided another statement, saying she saw the tragic incident unfold from her window.
“He proceeded to — I don’t want to say this word, but to, like, attack the officer,” the woman told police during an interview that morning, referring to Orlando Taylor III.
The woman said it was generally understood in the neighborhood that Orlando Taylor had “mental issues,” but she was in the business of minding her own.
“I’m usually the type of person that mind their own business. Helping people will definitely kill me one day. Like, I’m serious,” she told Police Lt. Daniel Reigner, according to the statement.
The woman also told Reigner she observed that Taylor brought a knife to what ended up being a gunfight, and it was two against one. She also noted that Falcon was injured and heavily bleeding when he raised his weapon. Roberts never fired his service weapon.
Falcon, who grew up in Puerto Rico, came to Springfield at age 19 and retired from the Air Force Reserve at Westover. He joined the Police Department in 2013, according to a police spokesman. He is slated for additional surgery to repair nerve damage in Boston, the spokesman added. Falcon has not publicly commented.
Mayor Domenic J. Sarno and Police Commissioner Cheryl C. Clapprood said at a press conference hours after the incident that they considered the shooting justified. The early assessments inflamed an already frayed relationship between police and the Black community and sparked skirmishing between city Law Department and Gulluni’s office amid calls to make the body-worn camera footage public.
The last, fatal police-involved shooting in Springfield occurred in 2014, when officers killed 34-year-old David Kingsbury. He had been slashing tires and menacing residents at his Mill Street apartment complex with a knife. He similarly threatened two responding officers in a hallway after 911 calls from Kingsbury’s neighbors, according to police reports at the time.
Then-acting Hampden District Attorney James Orenstein ultimately ruled the patrolman who shot Kingsbury, a white man, acted in self-defense and cleared the officer of wrongdoing. Orenstein noted in his report that Kingsbury had a history of mental illness.
At a multidenominational prayer vigil held Wednesday evening outside the Taylor home on Genesee Street, Earlene Taylor still seethed over a system she believes failed her grandson.
“I wasn’t supposed to see my grandson shot dead in front of me,” she told supporters and mourners who gathered. “But maybe I was supposed to see it. Maybe I was.”
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