Police charge Columbus mom with murder after toddler dies from alleged meth overdose
Columbus police have charged a young mother with murder in the 2021 death of a toddler who allegedly overdosed on methamphetamine that was left out where the unattended child found and ingested it.
Whether 25-year-old Taylor Taylorson’s charges of felony murder and second-degree cruelty to children were justified sparked a lengthy argument Friday in Columbus Recorder’s Court, where her preliminary hearing had been delayed a day so attorneys could research the issue.
Detective Natalie Smith testified that police were called at 8:16 a.m. May 17, 2021, to an apartment at 1011 Oakview Ave., where the parents had found 2-year-old Stefan Taylorson dead. An examination found no signs of trauma, and the child’s body was sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for an autopsy.
The medical examiner reported the boy, who was nine days shy of his third birthday, died from methamphetamine toxicity, with evidence of the drug found in his bloodstream, his gastric system, his heart and his liver, Smith said.
She said Taylorson and husband Malix Taylorson told police they had been using meth for about two days over the weekend of May 15 and 16, 2021, and had left the child unattended for about 12 hours that Sunday night, when the boy may have found and consumed some of the drug that was left out in the parents’ bedroom, either on a nightstand or dresser.
The Taylorsons told police they had put Stefan to bed about 7 p.m. that Sunday night, and the child got up and came into the parents’ bedroom only once, around midnight. They found him unresponsive about 7:30 a.m., when the mother’s phone showed she had conducted a Google search for “sleeping drugs that taste sweet,” Smith testified.
Based on those accounts and the autopsy evidence, police decided to file charges against the mother, who was arrested Wednesday morning. Malix Taylorson currently is in prison in Alabama on rape and other charges, authorities said. “He has a lengthy criminal history,” Smith testified.
The argument
The mother’s defense attorney, William Biddy, asked Judge Julius Hunter to dismiss the charges, arguing the child did not suffer the “cruel and excessive” pain required by Georgia’s cruelty to children law. If that charge could not be sustained, then neither could the felony murder count, because it was based on Taylorson’s causing the child’s death while committing the felony of child cruelty, Biddy said.
“’Cruel and excessive’ has to be something that shocks the conscience, judge,” Biddy told Hunter, later adding, “Bad health effects do not impugn cruel or excessive pain.”
Prosecutor Nicholas Hud countered that a jury ultimately would decided whether the child suffered excessively, should the case go to trial, and that was not an issue to be decided in a preliminary hearing. He noted also that Smith had said the bed on which the boy had lain had vomit and possibly blood on it, and the child was found to have a swollen brain and spinal cord.
Though Biddy claimed the parents called for help “right away,” after finding the boy unresponsive, Hud said the Google search on the mother’s phone showed they did not call 911 for 50 minutes.
That the toddler was left unsupervised for 12 hours was additional evidence of the parents’ neglect, he told Hunter.
In a brief phone interview later Friday, Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan said that by the time the parents discovered the boy’s body, he had been dead so long that rigor mortis had set in.
Citing a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in which similar cruelty charges were affirmed in a case involving a child’s ingesting cocaine, Hunter refused to dismiss the mother’s charges, and sent the case on to Muscogee Superior Court.
The mother will be held without bond until a Superior Court judge hears the case.
