NEW ORLEANS -- Ian Taylor died in a hail of gunfire in November of 2017, but the law enforcement officer didn’t die in the line of duty – he died at home after opening his door to a familiar face.
“When I answered the phone, the girl was screaming in the phone and she said they shot Ian,” Norman Taylor, Ian’s father, said.
Norman Taylor is a retired NOPD officer whose optimism made the news in the 90s when crime was at its worst in New Orleans. Decades later, he went to his own son’s murder scene only to be held back by his former colleagues.
“When I found out it was actually him and he was dead and the coroner’s wagon came and … it was hard,” Norman remembered.
Dionne Williams was at Walmart with her children when she got the news.
“She called me on the phone crying, saying ‘Dionne, Jabari killed Ian,” she said.
She had to hear it twice before it sank in.
Jabari is Dionne’s oldest son, but surprisingly, her first reaction wasn’t grief.
“I was scared, because I felt like if my son killed my cousin, now what’s he going to come and do to my kids?” Dionne said.
That night, Dionne and her other children hid at a hotel while Norman Taylor planned his revenge.
“I’m going to sit here right now and tell you if I could have gotten my hands on Jabari that night, I would have snatched the life out of him,” Norman said.
But Jabari was on the run.
It was hit mother who found him the next day and called police.
“It was real hard,” Dionne said through tears. “I cried. I cried before I did it and I asked God, was it the right thing to do?”
And with Jabari in jail, Norman began to wonder how he could get in there with him.
“I was going to do something to get arrested,” Norman said. “Just so they could put me in a cell with him … I was going to kill him.”
But fate, or faith, stepped in when Norman’s pastor stopped by right then. At that moment, right in his living room, Norman had a change of heart.
“I had my cry, but then I realized my killing him, my having hatred in my heart for him is not going to solve anything. So instead of hating this kid, I started praying for him,” Norman said.
Norman didn’t know Dionne well, as Ian was related to her on Ian’s mother’s side. He had no idea about the curse they faced.
Dionne says Jabari is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. She first noticed the symptoms 10 years ago.
“Jabari had been in and out of mental hospitals since he was 16,” Dionne said. “there was times when my son would tell me a rat crawled in him and died in his stomach.”
He’d also dangled her youngest child off the edge of a balcony and accused her of poisoning him.
“I watched him like his life was going down the drain and I prayed and I prayed and I just kept hoping he was going to get better,” she said. “But he didn’t.”
Jabari lived in fear and spread it. Especially after he got a gun two-and-a-half years ago.
If you’re wondering how that happened, consider the job he held at the time. He’d been hired as a deputy, a recruit, by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Norman Taylor is a former Orleans Parish Deputy himself, having worked there before the NOPD.
“My thing is better screening, come on!” Norman said. “How did you let a mental patient come to work in a penal institution? Where they put mental patients?”
To be sure, the job didn’t last long. Jabari left six months later, the sheriff’s office said it was for personal reasons, but he kept the gun.
Jabari is now in the psych unit of Hunt Correctional awaiting trial.
He actually called his mother while we were interviewing her. For nearly nine minutes Jabari repeated himself, not comprehending his mother’s replies. Dionne worried he wasn’t on his medication.
It’s likely he wasn’t at the time of the shooting either. Dionne kept the pills he’d been prescribed four days before the murder. He hadn’t taken any of them.
“I didn’t know initially that he was a mental patient,” Norman said. “That even made me more not want to hate him.”
Norman Taylor has been fighting crime his whole life. He was the officer who created the making friends club on his own time and dime, bringing kids together from rival neighborhoods in the 90s.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that he moved beyond praying for Jabari, to finally forgiving him.
“I want him to get help,” he said. “I want him to get mental help. I want him to get better. I don’t want to see him rot in jail.”
Dionne is still in awe of Norman’s forgiveness for her son.
“I felt like, maybe there was something more I could have done,” she said. “I still think about it. I didn’t think that he was going to forgive me, let alone my son who took his son’s life.”
This is the journey of two parents on the path to hope.
A trek beyond darkness, where their love for both a gentle giant and the man who killed him leads to peace.
As for Jabari’s employment as a deputy recruit, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office says its current policy is to screen applicants for mental health, but they never answered the question about whether that policy was in place at the time of Jabari’s employment.
As for his gun, Jabari’s mother said he bought his own gun during the time of his employment with the OPSO. The Sheriff’s Office said they do not released firearms to their employees.
“He never carried a firearm, nor was he authorized to carry a firearm as part of his duties with the OPSO,” the statement read.