Tim Taylor, man wrongfully accused in Brittanee Drexel case, sues DOJ over harm caused

Timothy Taylor and his mother, Joan Taylor, discuss the FBI’s wrongful accusations against him in the Brittanee Drexel case during an interview at their home in December 2022. (Drew Tripp, WCIV)

Photo: (Drew Tripp, WCIV)

(WCIV) — Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor, a South Carolina man wrongfully pursued as a suspect in the murder and abduction of Brittanee Drexel, has sued the U.S. Department of Justice over “investigative missteps” and “false narratives” advanced by the FBI during its yearslong effort to compel his confession to a crime he did not commit.

A lawyer for Taylor and his family filed the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court in Charleston. The complaint alleges the FBI inflicted severe emotional distress on the Taylor family by abusing its “vast powers” against them, all while having evidence linking Drexel’s actual killer, Raymond Moody, to the crime.

“Today continues the long and painful path to justice for our family,” Joan Taylor, Timothy Taylor’s mother, said in a press release on Tuesday. “For over a decade, my son and his father were relentlessly pursued for a crime that federal law enforcement officials knew neither of them committed because they had evidence to the contrary. Their illegitimate investigation wreaked havoc on our lives — and we demand answers from those responsible. Our family deserves a public apology, and my son deserves for the public to know his name without any association to Brittanee Drexel.”

Joan Taylor revealed in a 2022 interview with WCIV-TV authorities had questioned her husband, Shaun Taylor, within days of Drexel’s disappearance. Why remains unknown.

Shaun Taylor was also arrested as a suspect in an attempted abduction in Myrtle Beach a year after Drexel’s disappearance, but was later cleared after his lawyers produced surveillance videos proving he was not in the area of the incident.

Still, this did not stop law enforcement from going after the Taylors in the Drexel case, eventually turning their attention to Shaun’s son, Tim.

Tim Taylor, who has only one arm from a childhood accident, and who was only 16 years old and nearly 150 miles away the night of Drexel’s disappearance, was never formally charged with a crime in the Drexel case.

Instead, the FBI in 2016 charged him with an enhanced armed robbery charge for a years-old crime Taylor had already been convicted of in state court and already completed his sentence for. He had served as a getaway driver in a 2011 armed robbery at a McDonald’s in Mount Pleasant, and had gotten the lightest sentence (probation) of all three suspects.

The new federal robbery charge was a boldfaced effort to squeeze a confession out of Taylor about either himself or his father, Shaun, being involved in Drexel’s death. The FBI based its pursuit of the Taylors on the story of a prison informant who had no connection to the Taylors.

Originally, the informant reportedly told state and federal authorities that he witnessed Taylor and his father rape and murder Brittanee Drexel at a drug stash house, and that he heard they dumped her body in an “alligator pit” somewhere near their home in the fishing village of McClellanville.

This story would change several times over the years, eventually morphing to include no mention of the Taylors in Drexel’s death, and placing the timeline of her death days later and over 100 miles away.

The informant’s stories were eventually shown to be entirely fabricated, but FBI agents by this time had advanced the narrative of the Taylors’ suspected involvement publicly in a press conference held in June 2016, and later in an arraignment for Taylor on the trumped-up robbery charge, which the FBI initially used to argue Taylor should be held without bond.

The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecutors continued with their prosecution of Taylor on the armed robbery case for years without producing any further evidence of his involvement with Drexel. Taylor eventually was forced to plead guilty to the federal armed robbery charge, and was sentenced in 2019 to serve three years of probation.

During the 2022 plea hearing for Drexel’s confessed kidnapper and murderer, Raymond Moody, it was revealed federal investigators had moved on from suspicion of Taylor’s involvement years before without ever publicly recanting the information they’d publicized prior to arresting Taylor.