The Brittanee Drexel case: How to nearly destroy a Black family in 21st century America

Part I: The confession that almost happened

It was late 2016. The FBI was about to get its man – an innocent man.

Timothy Shaun Taylor, 49, of McClellanville, S.C., was going to confess to raping and murdering Brittanee Drexel of Chile, N.Y., even though he had never met Drexel. A cascade of tragedies and travesties had led Taylor to his lawyer’s office that day to discuss the process of confessing to a crime he had not committed but for which his family was being severely punished.

About seven years earlier, 17-year-old Drexel had defied her parents, like teenagers around the globe are wont to do, and snuck away with friends to spend spring break in Myrtle Beach. It spiraled into travesty for her family when Drexel, who had felt alienated from her friend group during the trip, walked alone along Ocean Boulevard early one night and ended up in the SUV of a strange man.

She wouldn’t be heard from again.

Shaun Taylor felt compelled to falsely confess because of what the Federal Bureau of Investigation had done just weeks before, accused Taylor and his son Dashaun Taylor of having fed Drexel’s body to alligators. The FBI claimed to have eyewitnesses to crimes it would take the public six years to learn the Taylors had not committed.

It’s no wonder that Shaun Taylor felt he couldn’t hold out against the most powerful arm of the American criminal justice system.

“I felt a sense of urgency, especially when I saw what it was doing to my children,” Taylor said in explaining the rationale behind a seemingly-perplexing decision.

Taylor knew his family’s resolve was buckling as a growing number of outsiders began mistakenly believing he and his son had tried to use Drexel in a sex trafficking scheme. The family’s physical and mental health were deteriorating. They were pushed below the poverty line, barely able to make ends meet. Neighbors abandoned them, snickered behind their backs. Employers fired them. Former associates refused to work with them. Media, local, regional and national, hounded them. Once-friendly pastors disinvited them from church services. Their grandkids grew concerned every time their father was out of sight, afraid police had dragged him away.

“I thought that damage was about to set in,” Taylor said.

Maybe Taylor would be sentenced to life after confessing, maybe sent to death row. In South Carolina, it could mean death by electrocution or firing squad. Make no mistake about what such a confession would mean: a Black man saying he violated a white girl in the worst way in the heart of the Deep South.

Those were the stakes Shaun Taylor was facing as he was preparing to confess all while knowing such a confession would provide fodder for those who already viewed dark skin as suspect, Black people guilty until proven innocent.

No matter. Taylor was going to do it, if not for his attorney, who talked him out of it. Still, Taylor didn’t know how else to save his family. Innocence hadn’t been enough to stop a years-long onslaught on their psyches, on their souls.

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For the past seven months, I have interviewed the Taylors, reached out to the Myrtle Beach Police Department, which did not want to comment, and spoken with Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson. I have the FBI’s public statements and questioned the office of the United States Attorney for the District of South Carolina. I’ve spent hours listening to and watching dozens of podcasts and true crime shows dedicated to this case, as well as quizzing journalists about their decisions to name the Taylors as suspects in such a gruesome case despite there being no formal charges. I’ve poured over court documents, sat through court hearings.

Truth be told, though, the real difficulty for me has been confronting the eerie similarities between the Taylors and my family. It’s not just that we are Black, and in the South. We grew up about an hour’s drive apart in rural South Carolina on either side of a forest named for an American Revolutionary War hero who was also a slaveowner in an area where our ancestors toiled as slaves. It’s not just that Timothy Shaun Taylor and his wife Joan Taylor are my age or that Joan Taylor grew up in the same church with the woman whom I’d eventually marry, Tracy Swinton Bailey, something I didn’t know for several years. It’s deeper than that even.

This cascade of injustice began unfolding at the dawn of a new era of race, bookended by the election of the nation’s first Black president and a supposed racial reckoning sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, which harkened back to days when white men in the South routinely took it upon themselves to commit extrajudicial racist killings of Black men. It was an era which began with surveys showing Black people more optimistic about the future of the country than their white counterparts for maybe the first time but ended with an unprecedented explosion of unrest after word spread and video showed a cop slowly snuffing the life out of Floyd.

In the months after Barack Obama was declared president-elect and before Drexel was reported missing, I, too, was optimistic. I had even driven to a nearby plantation the night of Obama’s victory to rejoice with the spirits of the enslaved, to tell them how much progress we had made. But as Obama was steering the country out of the Great Recession and carving a new image of what it meant to be Black in America, the Taylors were being pulled into a vortex of shame while my family was grieving the loss and absorbing the shock of my youngest brother’s fiancé having been murdered during a drive-by shooting. In a different incident, one of my brothers was thrown into a jail cell with serious wounds from a K9 unit and received no medical attention until my mother forced authorities to attend to him. It’s nothing new, though. Racial progress in the U.S. has never come in a straight line. The agency which brought Black people justice during the Civil Rights era when racist white juries refused to - but also harassed Black activists - was largely responsible for the pain the Taylors have endured.

The Taylors have been touched by the criminal justice system multiple times, sometimes warranted, sometimes not, just as my family has. I know they know what it feels like to be considered the black sheep of the black sheep, to have their presence used to fuel racist stereotypes about Black people and crime. It didn’t shock me that the public used the Taylors’ past mistakes to believe Shaun and Dashaun did the awful things they had been falsely accused of doing to Drexel. Neither did it surprise me that Drexel’s father, grappling with deep anguish over the then-unknown fate of his baby girl, would verbally attack the Taylors in a way that echoed the worst of this country’s racist history, or that the Taylors would forgive him even that, a common occurrence among Black people seasoned in the South’s version of Christianity.

We’ve repeatedly chosen forgiveness and grace over bitterness: after slavery; after a century’s worth of lynching; after Jim Crow; and even as our children have been locked in underfunded-segregated schools. It is a kind of faith that has sustained us during our darkest hours, the kind the Taylors relied upon to survive what Shaun Taylor said felt like a de facto enslavement.

“You know the movie ’12 Years A Slave’?” Shaun Taylor asked rhetorically. “Living under that stuff, it felt like 13 years a slave.”

PART II: A disappearance and false informant

On April 22, 2009, Drexel made a fateful choice. She wanted to spend spring break in Myrtle Beach, an annual rite of passage for countless others from the Rochester, N.Y., area. Her parents made a decision many parents in similar situations have, the one I would have made, too. They said no. They didn’t know well the small group of older friends with whom she would be taking a 13-hour-drive down I-95. Besides, her mother, Dawn Drexel, had a premonition that something bad would happen to her daughter. Brittanee snuck away to one of the nation’s top resort areas anyway. Myrtle Beach attracts an estimated 20 million tourists a year.

It would take more than 13 years to learn that she had been murdered by a man named Raymond Moody.

Moody had previously served 20 years in a prison on the other side of the country for kidnapping and raping a young girl and reportedly hurting several other young girls in the early 1980s before being released midway through his 40-year sentence and returning to South Carolina.

Drexel would willingly get into an SUV to “party” with Moody and his girlfriend, Moody would later tell police. He would initiate sex. Drexel would rebuff him. She would fight back, badly scratching his face and neck as he was violating her. Knowing the rape would mean more prison time, in a panic he would strangle her, Moody would say. He wrapped her body in a blanket and hid it in bushes before burying it.

In the weeks after Drexel went missing, massive searches were conducted; some included dozens of investigators and K9s in swampy areas near where Drexel’s cell phone last pinged. Billboards with her face popped up around the area. A memorial tree was planted in her honor in a popular spot in Myrtle Beach. I sent up countless silent prayers every time I passed it during many morning jogs; others knelt in front of it.

The Drexel case was remembered during a sex trafficking event attended by South Carolina’s attorney general. Some of her friends were initially considered suspects, if only informally, or it was suspected they knew what happened to her. Gates Chili High School in New York awarded her family an honorary high school diploma when she had been scheduled to graduate. TV, YouTube and true crime podcasts made her disappearance a national story. Dr. Phil interviewed her parents and Shaun Taylor’s son, Timothy Dashaun Taylor. Crime Watch Daily told its 5 million subscribers the FBI allegation against the Taylors was “a dramatic break in the case.”

Initially, Shaun Taylor was only indirectly implicated. He was charged with attempting to kidnap a different woman a year after Drexel had gone missing – a case media quickly claimed had similarities to what was then wrongly believed to have happened to Drexel – and spent months in jail. (In the subsequent years, no other arrest has been made in that attempted kidnapping case.) Joan Taylor got word of her husband’s arrest and the search of their home while on a church bus midway through a trip to Busch Gardens in Virginia, which dozens of kids and adults had been planning for months. A gaggle of media members and their microphones and cameras were there to greet her when she arrived back in McClellanville. Media kept reporting that charge even after Shaun Taylor proved his innocence. He had tracked down restaurant video surveillance which showed he was eating lunch 40 miles away when that alleged abduction was unfolding.

That false 2010 charge against Shaun Taylor put the family in the crosshairs of law enforcement, media and public. That cloud hung over them for years as the Drexel case would periodically generate front-page news, fade from the headlines, then lead local TV newscasts and be featured on national talk shows. The case – and the Taylors’ lives – exploded when the FBI made its allegations about sex trafficking and alligator pits. The agency used an unrelated case to put even more pressure on the family.

In 2011, Dashaun Taylor was the getaway driver for a Saturday morning robbery of a McDonald’s in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. He was the youngest person involved in the crime in which a manager sustained non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. He said he knew he was wrong but had been hanging out with a couple of older men he should not have been. During the robbery, he tried to make things right. He flagged down a passerby to call 911 shortly after his accomplices entered the restaurant, one of whom threatened to kill him if he didn’t fulfill his planned role.

Taylor, 20 years old at the time, was sentenced under the Youth Offenders Act and received 18 months of probation after cooperating with law enforcement. (The shooter received a 25-year-sentence and is still in prison.) In 2016, a federal grand jury indicted Dashaun Taylor for the McDonald’s robbery. He had no choice but to plead guilty because five years earlier he had confessed to his role in that robbery in state court. For the federal charges, Taylor was sentenced to three years of probation and time served. I must say this for emphasis: That meant that though Dashaun Taylor was never formally charged in the Drexel case, he indirectly spent nearly a year in jail because of it.

At a 2016 hearing for the federal McDonald’s robbery charges, the FBI declared that Dashaun Taylor had direct involvement in the Drexel case. They claimed he had kidnapped Drexel for sex trafficking and murdered her after the overwhelming amount of media attention made her a liability.

Stop and ponder the claim the FBI was making - and what it led to: That a 17-year-old Black boy who had lost an arm in an accident when he was four years old was at the helm of a plan to kidnap and sexually traffick a 17-year-old white girl, that he somehow had grabbed her off a busy street in the heart of Myrtle Beach during a busy tourist week and drove her an hour away where she was ganged raped by his friends - and that story became the predominate one in the minds of the public.

The entire foundation of the FBI case, however, was the word of a jailhouse informant who said he saw Dashaun Taylor and a group of young Black men gang raping Drexel in a so-called stash house. They presented no evidence to the court or public proving the allegations true – because such evidence did not exist. And yet, the FBI punished Dashaun Taylor a second time for the McDonald’s robbery in an effort to pressure him to reveal details about Drexel.

The jailhouse informant told the FBI he was at the stash house to conduct a drug deal with Shaun Taylor. He saw Drexel run out of the house, get caught and pistol whipped, he told the FBI. As he was leaving, he heard gunshots, assumed Drexel had been killed, possibly by Shaun Taylor, then saw what he believed was Drexel’s body wrapped in a carpet he believed was taken to an alligator pit, the informant claimed.

The informant’s story changed several times. It mattered not that a lack of evidence for his claims made it impossible for the FBI to officially charge either Taylor in Drexel’s disappearance. The informant’s tales became so rooted in the public’s consciousness, the Taylors kept showing up in headlines as Moody’s name faded from the spotlight. In the public’s mind, Moody, a convicted sex offender in the area, was initially considered a suspect, especially after police searched the hotel room where he lived. But in the intervening years, his name was less frequently associated with Drexel’s disappearance even as the Taylors became more tied to the case in media reports. The die had been cast. The Taylors had been pulled into the case of a missing girl they did not know, had never laid eyes on beyond the photos on billboards, in newspapers and on newscasts that bombarded us all.

The deepest cut for Timothy Shaun Taylor came from Chad Drexel. Taylor is father to a daughter, Shaunleese, like Drexel was father to Brittanee, whom he adopted not long after marrying her mother. The things Chad Drexel said about the Taylors stung.

After the FBI went public with its claims in 2016, Drexel called Dashaun “a horrible piece of trash.” He said Joan Taylor, Dashaun’s mother and Shaun’s wife, was defending her son despite knowing the evil things Chad Drexel was certain Dashaun had done to Brittanee. He had the proof from the FBI, Myrtle Beach police and private investigators he had hired, Chad Drexel confidently asserted.

“Timothy [Dashaun] Taylor is KNOWN to be involved in dog fighting, bringing drugs to parties, and raping women (mostly Caucasian young women) he either picks up UNWILLINGLY or friends of friends that end up being drugged and taken there,” Chad Drexel wrote on Facebook for the world to see. “There is a TON more ‘EVIDENCE and HORRIBLE INFO’ we would like the PUBLIC in that area be aware of for their safety, but we are unable to disclose at this time.”

It was bad having strangers target Shaun Taylor’s family, bombarding them with death threats. It was worse spending time in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and watching his son suffer the same fate. But to have the father of the murdered girl publicly turn his anger on you, it was almost incomprehensible. As a father, he understood Chad Drexel’s rage. As a fellow human being, he knew Chad Drexel was grieving, living through a 13-year-long nightmare having to listen to repeated claims that his daughter suffered an ungodly end.

“I know I’d feel the same if I was in that position,” Shaun Taylor said.

But Chad Drexel did not know what the Taylors were feeling, the damage the ugly accusations were inflicting upon them - literally.

PART III: A mother’s pain

They knew something was wrong when Joan Taylor’s annual visit to her lung doctor had become a monthly routine. She went from needing one inhaler to relying upon three.

“I had asthma but we couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t breathe, why I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

Finally, her doctor told her to check her house, that mold was the most logical explanation.

A friend brought over a UV light. Black mold was everywhere, in the walls, in the ceiling, in the floor. Black mold can affect a person for days after only a few hours of exposure, particularly those dealing with respiratory problems. Joan Taylor had probably been breathing in the stuff for a couple of years before they discovered it. The Taylors hadn’t known about the mold. But they knew the roof on their then-16-year-old doublewide manufactured home had been leaking for at least three years, which they had been preparing to have replaced. Those plans were put on hold. The false allegations against Shaun and Dashaun made it impossible for the Taylors to generate steady income.

While the FBI was pressuring Dashaun Taylor to falsely confess, Joan Taylor’s bosses at retirement community Sandpiper Village in Mt. Pleasant were pressuring her to remain silent, she said. The Sandpiper officials I was able to get in touch with after visiting the community and sending messages confirmed Taylor’s employment history but did not provide further comment.

“To not fight for my son, who is innocent?” Taylor asked her superiors at Sandpiper after being told she had “become public” by speaking with the Post & Courier newspaper in Charleston. The Post & Courier was the first to publish the FBI’s allegations against the Taylors, though industry standards since the FBI falsely accused a security guard named Richard Jewell of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta were supposed to be not publishing the names of suspects until they had been officially charged. (The paper declined comment, saying it will let its reporting speak for itself.)

That same year, Joan Taylor was being accused at Sandpiper for not properly accounting for a $99 box of fish an employee had purchased. Never mind that she had been out of the office on a two-week recovery from carpal tunnel surgery. Never mind that she had begun going into work at 4 a.m. and getting off at noon to avoid being seen by those who might find her too much of a distraction. Never mind that she had been relegated to her office for most of those hours, had phone calls rerouted, felt like a leper at a place where she had been an accountant for more than a decade and thought to be on track for a promotion.

She was fired on Dec. 5, 2016.

“It was on a Monday,” Joan Taylor said. “They said after much consideration we think it’s in the best interest of the company to terminate you. I said thank you for everything y’all have done, but right now I’m on my way to my uncle’s funeral. Have a good day.”

Taylor was initially denied unemployment benefits and struggled to make ends meet by applying for food stamps and other assistance. A few loyal friends chipped in, kept them afloat. It wasn’t enough to fix their roof, or to remove the black mold – a task they largely had to take care of themselves. Junkyard attendants in Georgetown and Charleston refused to work with Shaun Taylor’s towing and wrecking business. Their roof continued its drip, drip, drip. Repairs to the home are ongoing but slow going.

“Money for us was real scarce,” Joan Taylor said.

Here in the Deep South, Black families like the Taylors have long been told to rely upon a deep abiding faith in a Christian God, take education seriously, work hard, be accountable when we mess up. They did all of that. Still, they were pushed to the brink, another Black family nearly dismantled by an unforgiving system.

PART IV: The final confession

“If I admit to it, they’ll leave my kids alone,” Shaun Taylor told his lawyer in late 2016.

He hadn’t told his wife. She would try to talk him out of it, and he didn’t want to be talked out of it. His lawyer did, anyway, by pointing out the obvious: Taylor didn’t have any information about Drexel. His confession could have generated headlines even more damning than the ones he had endured for about a decade and landed him in prison, further compromising a Black family trying not to crumble, and maybe even unintentionally persuade Moody to stay quiet.

“It really does take a toll on you. It really plays with your mind,” said Shaun Taylor’s 25-year-old daughter Shaunleese Taylor as she recounted times she received automated phone notifications about the latest updates about the gruesome case.

“At some point you just want to say leave us alone,” she said.

She’ll never forget the day at work overhearing colleagues joke about “the Black guy who fed that white girl to alligators” not knowing they were referring to lies about her brother, or when a death threat showed up by text and almost felled her in the middle of a grocery store.

Her father was planning to confess for her benefit so the endless stream of commentators on social media would leave her be. Shaun Taylor was also grieving. His mother had died before getting to see him declared innocent. It was the perfect recipe for the irrational – confessing to an egregiously-violent crime you didn’t commit, confessing to an evil – could metamorphose into the rational.

Shaun Taylor’s is an extreme illustration of the devil’s bargain Black people often face as we grapple with how best to protect ourselves against systemic problems: blame ourselves because it’s the only way to mitigate the damage and claim some semblance of control, or stand firm knowing such defiance or resilience can produce a different kind of damage. Those results show up not only in mass incarceration numbers like those in South Carolina, whose prison population is 60 percent Black but overall population is only 29 percent Black. It literally shows up in our bodies.

Researchers such as Arline Geronimus of the University of Michigan have done more than most to track this phenomenon and give it a name: weathering. Geronimus and I did a joint presentation for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California Annenberg for Communication and Journalism about the under-discussed and under-appreciated effects of racism and other forms of persistent-daily discrimination.

Based on more than 30 years of research, Geronimus has been able to document that how society treats us often has more of an effect on our health and the aging process than the individual choices we make. While they show up in a variety of vulnerable groups, including poor white people, the effects are particularly pronounced in Black people enduring a lifetime of stressors related to inequities and inequality.

“Weathering might manifest as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, respiratory diseases, or other chronic diseases of aging, but a person who is weathered suffers stress-mediated wear and tear across their body systems long before they can be diagnosed with specific diseases or conditions,” she writes in “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society.”

Such effects can be seen in the Taylor family, in mine, and others like us. In addition to research like that of Geronimus, scientists from institutions such as Harvard University and Stanford University have found that the trauma inflicted upon young bodies can show up decades later in a myriad of physical problems, and that Black children are disproportionately exposed to such situations. I spent 25 years struggling with an undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that stemmed from what I experienced as a boy. I watched helplessly as my father beat my mother and my oldest brother was taken off to prison after succumbing to the travails of growing up in a Sundown Town where Black people were warned to not be out at night. I speak with a severe stutter well into adulthood that can also be traced back to those events. I’m considered a success story because I made it out to become a writer and professor at an elite college.

I’m one of the overcomers too often falsely described as having pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps through hard work and good decision-making. But the less-celebrated part of my story is how I nearly died in my early 40s from a rare hard-to-explain condition that, much like my stutter and PTSD, probably began developing when I was a boy growing up in the shadow of Jim Crow. That’s why I fear for the Taylor kids. They, too, will have to overcome what happened to their family but may never be able to pinpoint the source of later physical, mental and emotional struggles, and may even be blamed for not having overcome perfectly.

“The repeated or chronic activation of stress processes over years and decades—the measurable physiological stress you feel in the body—has both immediate and long-lasting consequences for physical health and longevity. In short, it can make you sick or disabled or even kill you,” Geronimus writes. “If you are a member of a marginalized group, you cannot educate or buy yourself out of weathering completely… On the contrary: if you’re Black, working hard and playing by the rules can be part of what kills you. For the Black community, this is a cause of death that dates back centuries, because the stress of navigating presumptions based on stereotypes, all while working hard and keeping a low profile, has been killing Black Americans since the time of slavery and continues to do so in the 21st century.”

On May 4, 2022, Raymond Moody sat down with his lawyer and law enforcement officials and told them what he had done to Brittanee Drexel. On April 25, 2009, he said, “the Drexel girl was walking on the sidewalk. I was smoking pot and she noticed that and walked over to the door and said something about, ‘It smells like good weed.’ I said, ‘Hey yeah you want some? Get in.’ She hopped right in the back without a problem.”

Moody, Drexel and his girlfriend, Angel Vause, rode together to the Pole Yard Boat Landing in Georgetown, which is south of Myrtle Beach and north of McClellanville in Charleston County, where the Taylors live.

Moody had not planned to harm her, he said. But after Vause left the two of them alone, Moody eventually forced the 17-year-old Drexel to take off her clothes and raped her.

“I was scared, and she was scared,” he told police.

He then strangled her. He hid her body near the boat landing and donated most of her belongings to the Salvation Army, save for her phone, which he threw in a river. He told Vause that Drexel’s friends had picked her up. The next morning, he buried her body. For a time, he kept her high school student ID before getting rid of that, too.

For years, he denied any involvement in Drexel’s disappearance, including when police in 2011 searched a hotel room where he was staying.

Law enforcement said his confession came after advances in technology allowed them to pinpoint the time Drexel disappeared and track a vehicle that belonged to Moody. Investigators used that information to locate Vause, whom they convinced to wear a wire during a conversation with Moody. That led to a search and eventually Moody’s confession. About 12 years before that confession, Moody had been charged with failure to register as a sex offender.

Despite his having been named a suspect and interrogated during the early stages of the investigation, law enforcement officials in 2022 accepted his confession only after their investigation proved his SUV was near where Drexel had been last spotted by surveillance cameras on Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach, he led them to her remains, and DNA tests and dental records confirmed it was her body. Only then did law enforcement officials call a press conference to announce they had arrested and charged Moody. The FBI was not nearly as careful when a jailhouse informant falsely claimed the Taylors were responsible for Drexel’s disappearance, announcing the claims in court without confirming them.

In October 2022, as the Taylors joined the Drexels and dozens of local, regional, and national reporters in a Georgetown County, S.C., courtroom, Moody called himself “a monster,” apologized to the Drexel family and was sentenced to life in prison.

The Taylors got an apology that day as well. It came from an unexpected source at 11:17 a.m. Oct. 19, 2022, more than a dozen years after Shaun Taylor had been wrongly connected to Drexel’s disappearance. It was the first time anyone had publicly apologized to the Taylors. It came, not from the FBI, but a mother whose daughter had been violently snatched out of her life.

“For 13 years, others were blamed for your actions, and for that I am sorry for all they have endured,” Brittanee’s mother, now Dawn Pleckan, said while giving a victim impact statement during Moody’s sentencing hearing.

After that hearing, Brittanee’s parents and the Taylors met for the first time. Shaun Taylor and Chad Drexel embraced, even shared a few private jokes away from the media horde milling around the Georgetown County courthouse. This week, Chad Drexel emailed me: “It’s important for everyone to know that this was what I was told by law enforcement for years. This was all I had to go by. We were made to believe and trust the law enforcement, so we believed the story I was told as if it was fact - and I PERSONALLY APOLOGIZE for believing what I was told... NO ONE in ANY RACE should have to deal with anything like that! I am SO SORRY for the damage that has caused the Taylor family.”

Part V: Accountability

It was painful watching Chad Drexel and Shaun Taylor exchange pleasantries the day of Moody’s hearing. Not because they were insincere - their interaction seemed genuine, warm. But it felt like another kind of injustice that less than an hour after a father had finally gotten a measure of justice – a day for which he had waited for 13 years – he was standing outside a courthouse begging for forgiveness.

“Y’all don’t blame us, do you?” he asked pleadingly, away from the cameras and microphones. “I’m so sorry. Please tell Dashaun.”

“I never blamed y’all,” Shaun Taylor responded.

Dashaun was there with several family members to watch Moody be sentenced to life in prison for crimes which Dashaun had been falsely accused. He did not want to talk to the media or many others that day. He left before his father and Chad Drexel embraced.

Because of the false allegations, Dashaun Taylor rarely travels alone, unsure if today might be the day he’s going to be attacked. He doesn’t feel comfortable taking his kids out in public without another adult around. He had to miss the funeral of a friend because he had to wear an ankle monitor while the FBI was trying to pressure him into confessing to a crime he had not committed.

He extends trips, even if just to buy a can of grease while he’s building a car engine, for which he’s received training from a NASCAR-affiliated school near Charlotte, to ensure a store or restaurant’s surveillance cameras capture his image. He wants to be surveilled. He needs to be surveilled. It’s the only way to guarantee if more false allegations come, he’ll be able to prove his whereabouts. It’s not lost on him his father avoided a conviction and long prison sentence because his father had happened to eat lunch at a McDonald’s where the surveillance cameras were working.

He’s had strange men and women follow him, and snap his picture, as far away as Michigan when he traveled to work – even after Moody confessed to murdering Drexel.

“They look like they thinking if we weren’t in public we’d hang that nigger,” he said.

The FBI hanged neither Dashaun Taylor nor Shaun Taylor. The false allegations the FBI pumped into the public’s blood stream nearly did.

This is the part of the story that angers me most, and it should disturb you, too. No one in the Drexel case has taken responsibility for what happened to the Taylors. Not one official, not one local elected leader, has spoken up to say that the Taylors should not be left to their own devices to pick up the pieces of a life the criminal justice system – and an all-too-eager public and media – shattered.

For 13 years, residents of the Grand Strand, as well as those in the Rochester, N.Y., area, were concerned about this case. For much of that period, we followed every development, led prayer groups, attended vigils, joined in searches for her body in swampy areas. For much of that period, we – collectively – became convinced the Taylors, Black men, had kidnapped and raped and murdered a 17-year-old white girl. Yet after we found out that the real perpetrator was a white top-tier convicted sex offender who had attacked several other girls, we moved on without as much as a second thought about what the Taylor family was left to contend with.

Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver said what happened to the Taylors “was a travesty” but that his office had never considered them suspects and always focused on Moody.

In short: It’s not his responsibility to help the Taylors heal.

Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said he never believed the Taylors were involved in Drexel’s kidnapping; that’s why he stayed away from the FBI press conference during which she was declared dead, and did not co-sign on the agency’s decision to reveal in open court that a jailhouse informant said the Taylors were responsible.

In short: It’s not his responsibility to help the Taylors heal.

“The state didn’t have one thing to do with the Taylors,” Richardson said. “I knew better than to get involved with anything on that. [The FBI] had jailhouse informants, but you’ve got to be able to back those up. You’ve got to be able to see if what they’re telling you is true, just like we did with [Raymond Moody]. My heart goes out to the Taylors. But for me to come in and apologize it would be almost like me apologizing to your wife for something you did. That is a better question for the federal people.”

Weaver, Richardson, Myrtle Beach police and others were part of the same task force hunting for Drexel’s killer. They jointly announced Moody’s capture in May while not even mentioning the Taylor name. They had to have known a word of exoneration to the media at any point over several years would have lifted an enormous burden from the Taylors’ shoulders – but they chose to remain silent as those false allegations were decimating an innocent Black family.

In statements, the FBI said it had to follow leads during its investigation and is now confident Moody is the man who killed Brittanee Drexel. It has neither contacted the Taylors nor offered as much as an apology, publicly or privately. Even after being told of the enormous damage the FBI’s false allegations caused the Taylor family, the United States Attorney for the District of South Carolina said it agreed with the FBI “statement that they have an obligation to follow leads to their conclusion, and share their satisfaction that Britanee Drexel’s killer has been brought to justice.”

“They, and we, direct our criminal investigations based on the best information and evidence available to us at that time,” said Brook Andrews, First Assistant United States Attorney.

Joan Taylor mentioned Attorney General Merrick Garland by name during a press conference. The man who is the nation’s most powerful cop because Black South Carolina voters were integral in making Garland’s boss president has said nothing to or about the family. He has given well-received speeches about the need to acknowledge and deal with racial injustice but has not yet found the time to publicly reckon with this one, which was inflicted by his FBI.

The agency has admitted no wrongdoing, not even for its claim that Dashaun Taylor had failed a polygraph when questioned about Drexel, which they used as part of their efforts to pressure Taylor into what would have been a false confession. That “failed” polygraph test was then reported by news media ad nauseam. Never mind that researchers have time and again shown such tests to be junk science, no better than psychics or charlatans at determining truth.

The FBI and others in the justice system can walk away from a wreckage of their making because of a series of legal technicalities that gives them wide latitude and power to publicly accuse innocent men but no obligation to make amends when they cause enormous harm to the innocent.

There is no law preventing what happened to the Taylors from happening to any of us, said Allie Menegakis of South Carolina for Criminal Justice Reform, a non-profit representing the Taylor family.

Trying people through the media means the government doesn’t have to adhere to the principle of innocence until proven guilty. They can cause reputational harm – convince the public you are guilty of the worst offenses – without having to prove a thing. Evidence becomes unnecessary, the constitution rendered toothless.

“When you are charged, accused of a crime, all of these constitutional rights kick in,” Menegakis said. “But this is an avenue for the government to get around. It’s really scary. It’s very discretionary from agency to agency and detective to detective.”

As scary as that is – and it is frightening – a graver realization is that your neighbors, the people you work with, whom you rub elbows with in Walmart, don’t much seem concerned when it happens, particularly to a Black family nearly destroyed by a system which claims its primary goal is justice. It’s bad that law enforcement walked away from this case without making amends to the Taylors, let alone offering any form of reparations. It’s worse the public did the same, either not realizing or caring that these are the types of incidents that deepen an already-too-deep gulf of distrust between cops and communities of color, a distrust that affects the safety of us all.

I’ve been here long enough to see this community rally together to help strangers recover from hurricane-induced floods, stand shoulder-to-shoulder building shelters for the homeless, clothing and feeding people burned out of their homes by wildfires. It’s because this community has long recognized that each of us is susceptible to disasters not of our own making. Maybe we will someday come to grips with the devastating power of the unnatural disaster that is an unjust justice system. That day is long overdue and couldn’t come soon enough.

This story was originally published January 5, 2023 at 12:00 AM.