CORRECTION: This story was updated to reflect the fact that police found drugs in Mr. Taylor's car after his arrest. (3pm MT, March 23, 2022)

By Stephen Silha for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Lily Böhlke for Michigan News Connection reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

Everette Taylor is a family man.

Except that he's in prison and can't see his family.

The slim, 6-foot-1-inch 45-year-old is being held at the Macomb Correctional Facility in Michigan. Over the past 23 years, he's resided in 16 of Michigan's 30 prisons, which house about 33,000 people-disproportionately men of color.

Taylor is not as famous as his daughter Breonna, who was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13, 2020, and whose death helped to spur the historic racial justice uprisings. He's one of the 2.3 million mostly faceless incarcerated souls whose treatment is a stain upon America's promise of liberty and justice for all.

It's not that he didn't deserve a term in prison, but he certainly doesn't deserve to languish there for the rest of his life. Taylor had six kids before he was 19. Young, unemployed, and Black, he was determined to support them. Busted for dealing drugs, he's spent the majority of his adult life in prison.

On Feb. 12, 1998, Taylor was dealing drugs, and when he delivered a bag to Elijah McGee through the driver's window of the car, McGee sped off. Taylor grabbed and retained the bag of contraband, but one of his accomplices shot at the car and killed the driver.

So, Taylor was convicted, as per Michigan law, as an "aider and abettor," an accomplice to the crime of first-degree murder.

Because he didn't pull the trigger, the jury reduced his term to second-degree murder, sentencing him to 25-50 years in prison instead of life without parole.

Shortly after the shooting, the Grand Rapids police found drugs in the back seat of Taylor's car-marijuana and cocaine. They booked him for drug possession with intent to sell, which carries a sentence of 20-40 years. But because he was given poor legal advice, Taylor's sentences were carried out consecutively, not concurrently, which they would have been had the drug sentence come first. So, between the two convictions, he was sentenced to 45 years minimum in prison.

This is also known among prisoners as "death by incarceration."

I am continually amazed by how many super-smart people are languishing in our prisons. So-called correctional facilities are essentially warehousing human beings, and many facilities are spreading disease and discouragement. Many inmates should instead be with their families and communities, working to create positive change. They should be lawyers, doctors, barbers, ministers, active fathers, hiking partners, chefs, lovers.

Many of these men and women have been forced to face up to who they are with days, weeks, months, or even years of introspection-the kind privileged people pay good money for at meditation retreats, drug therapies, and self-help seminars.

By all accounts, Everette Taylor has been as good a father as the prison system has allowed. Five of his kids have survived with his help and good counsel-but not his daughter Breonna, shot and killed in her own apartment by police who raided it, looking for drugs that were supposedly in another apartment.

I met Taylor through Joshua Puckett, the son of Joe Creedon, a dear friend who died of AIDS in 1991. After losing his father, Puckett came home from school one afternoon to discover that his mother and her wife had been murdered by their next-door neighbor. Traumatized, he joined a gang, and a 12-year-old girl was tragically killed in gang war crossfire.

Puckett has been in prison for 28 years. Like Taylor, he was sentenced for a crime he did not directly commit but in which he was involved as an "aider and abettor." He has called for Taylor's release.

Unthinkable Loss

Taylor is like many parents of color who have lost their beloved progeny to police violence in America.

Speaking to him via phone interviews, I found out that "Skeeter," as his friends call him, had his own problems with police while growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1990s. Passed over for jobs because of his skin color, victim to the stagnant economic growth of that decade, he dealt drugs. It was the most lucrative and easy way to support his six children.

Back then, 21-year-old Skeeter was a popular man about town in Grand Rapids. Breonna was his fourth child, born when he was just 17. She and her mother, Tamika Palmer, moved to Louisville when Breonna was 5.

Taylor has chosen to stay in the background in the years since Breonna's murder, saying he "didn't want my record to detract from the situation at hand."

But in fact, his record typifies important aspects of the many stories that Breonna's death symbolizes. Tens of thousands of Americans-a majority of them people of color-were mistreated by police and unfairly sentenced after anti-marijuana and tough-on-crime laws (co-sponsored by then Sen. Joe Biden) were passed in the 1980s and '90s.

People like Taylor were labeled "super-predators" by politicians on both sides of the proverbial political aisle. Today, although many leaders disavow such language, people like Taylor remain incarcerated-an incalculable loss to his family and community.

"You're either locked [up] or dead, basically," says Taylor.

People Like Taylor Belong at Home With Family

"Skeeter is the glue [of the family]," affirms Taylor's mother, Janice Rostic. She explains that his nickname originated after his uncle commented, when he was a baby, "His head looks like a mosquito!" Rostic didn't like that, but her son nevertheless came to be called "Skeeter."

Taylor's son Everette III, who is named after him, is affectionately known as "Little Skeeter." The 29-year-old reminisces, "Ever since I was in fourth grade, he's reached out to me and given me good advice," adding, "Even when I got in trouble, he's been there for me."

Our prisons are filled with people like Taylor who have turned themselves around in various ways-people whose insights, caring, and intelligence would be much more useful, and less expensive, on the outside than behind bars, and whose families yearn to be with them.

Taylor was sowing his oats and, in his words, "figuring things out" in 1992, when he was only 16. His six children-all from different mothers, in the span of only three years-were Asia, De'Andrea, Ateaonia, Breonna, Everette III, and Shantelle. "I was smoking so much marijuana," he explains, "I honestly thought I was sterile."

Today, his children are the center of his life. He writes and speaks with them regularly, encouraging them to have patience and to stay in touch with each other. "I really respect their mothers for keeping our family together, for letting me have access to them," he says. He says he's on good terms with them all-mothers and kids.

"Dad is the glue that keeps us together," says his 29-year-old daughter De'Andrea, who goes by Dee Dee, and who until last year lived in Houston as a social worker for Goodwill.

Taylor's dream is to continue to rebuild relationships with family and loved ones, to get a job, and to ultimately open a barber shop. Meanwhile, Dee Dee's mission-as was Breonna's-is to get their father out of prison.

Recently, Dee Dee moved back to Grand Rapids with the intention of opening "Breeway," named after her late sister, as a halfway house for returning prisoners, including her dad.

Memories of Breonna, Family Aspirations

Like any family that loses a loved one, there's a giant piece of the fabric missing, and everyone is trying to figure out how to stitch things back together after Breonna's death. According to Ateaonia, her sister was "lively, sparkly, the life of the party." Her father and surviving siblings attest to how she smiled a lot and was independent and driven to make life better for herself.

Breonna stayed in close contact with the family, texting and FaceTiming them often. She took her brother, Everette III, on memorable tours of Grand Rapids and Louisville. Like her father, she attracted people but didn't demand attention. She was "laid-back," as per her father's favorite description of her.

According to her grandmother, Rostic, "These kids-including Breonna-are sisters and brother. There was never any sense of half-this or half-that."

Yet there's been no mention of these siblings in Breonna Taylor's obituaries.

"Since we lost Breonna," Ateaonia Taylor, 28, reports, "Dad's been calling almost every day. He's a great father. I wish he could be home with us, meet his grandkids, be with us." Her 27-year-old sister Shantelle, who got married in September 2020, concurs, saying, "I wish he were here to walk through these times with me."

"Thank God we can have real conversations," says 29-year-old sibling Asia Tucker, grateful for the ability to communicate in spite of her father's incarceration. "I feel closer to my dad than to my mom. He helped me stop smoking. And when I was homeless, he gave me hope."

Taylor's current "early release date" is 2031, which means he will be 54 years old by the time he is free. That's nine more years of missing out on birthdays, weddings, Christmases, and being able to hug his children and mother.

"I wish I could hug Skeeter," says Rostic. "I can't imagine how it feels to be locked up and dealing with no visits because of COVID, in the middle of all this."

Stephen Silha wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Silha is a freelance writer, filmmaker, and futurist. His current project, Journalism that Matters, is a conversational think-and-do tank concerned with the future of journalism.


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Cities and states are struggling with mounting homelessness, and West Virginia is no exception.

A recent report points to potential solutions and immediate actions local governments can take to reduce the number of people on the streets.

A different report, released this year by the state's Department of Human Services, found homelessness is up by 24% compared to 2021.

Providing jobs such as trash cleanup for homeless individuals, and managing public spaces, are effective - said Lisel Petis, senior fellow at the R Street Institute.

She said in several states local organizations are working with businesses to create safe designated places for people living in cars to go at night.

"One that I've spoken with where they have seen success in working with businesses and using parking lots and giving people some privacy," said Petis, "so that they can transition from their car back into houses."

According to the state report, nearly 60% of individuals experiencing homelessness were male, and nearly half were between the ages of 25 and 44.

Thirteen percent identified themselves as Black or African American.

Petis added that while encampment sweeps reduce the spread of disease and reduce pollution, they can also displace people without offering viable alternatives and destroy personal belongings and important documents - increasing barriers to long-term stability for unhoused people.

She said she believes the surge of anti-camping laws popping up across the nation is a knee-jerk reaction to a complex and long-simmering problem.

"Homelessness across the nation has been growing year over year since about 2016," said Petis, "so we know that just by kind of slapping a band aid on isn't going to stop this growing issue."

According to a 2019 report from the National Homelessness Law Center, 72% of the 187 cities surveyed had at least one law enforcing public camping bans, a 92% increase from 2006.




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New federal data show aggravated assaults are up in Kentucky by 7.2%, but other types of violent crime have gone down.

Overall, violent crime in Kentucky remains much lower compared to the nation as a whole, said Ashley Spalding, research director at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

"When you compare 2023 to that 2021 peak for violent crime," she said, "we see it's come down significantly since then."

A 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found younger people and people with lower incomes are far more likely to report being the victim of a violent crime than are higher-income people.

Spalding said laws such as House Bill 5, which lawmakers passed earlier this year, will drive up the number of people in the state's prisons and jails without addressing the root cause of crime.

"High rates of incarceration in communities are associated with higher rates of overdose deaths," she said. "The more that states make harsher criminal penalties for opioids like fentanyl, can put communities more at risk."

She said the policies in the bill are expected to cost the state an estimated $1 billion over the next decade. That money, she contended, could go toward health care, shelters and other resources that help communities.

"It would be the wrong direction for Kentucky to pass more harmful, harsh, regressive criminal legal system policies in 2025," she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said they believe there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite an ongoing downward trend in crime rates.

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Hundreds of people from across Michigan gathered in Lansing this week, urging House Speaker Joe Tate, D-Detroit and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, to advance the Second Look Sentencing Act to improve prison safety. The legislation allows people serving long sentences to have their cases reviewed for possible sentence reductions based on factors such as rehabilitation. The crowd included formerly incarcerated people who've turned their lives around and their families, victims of crime, prison staff and lawmakers.

Chuck Warpehoski, projects director with Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration, warned there is a prison staffing crisis in Michigan.

"We're seeing it in nursing, we're seeing it in child care, we're seeing it on the shop floor, we're seeing it with baristas. When it happens in a prison and people are forced to work mandatory double shifts, they're tired, they're not seeing their family -- it creates unsafe conditions for everyone," he said.

Warpehoski added they're urging lawmakers to pass the Second Look Act during this lame-duck session before they go home for the holidays.

He also pointed out the high costs of incarcerating people -- up to $48,000 per year, per person. He added that with the failed pay incentives to attract more staff, he believes it's clear a different solution is needed. Warpehoski shared some of the feedback they received.

"A lot of legislators and their staff said, hey, this makes sense -- and so it was a really, really positive response from not every office, but from a large number of offices we had meetings with," he continued.

Warpehoski stressed that Second Look legislation focuses on fairness by offering the possibility of release for individuals who have rehabilitated and are no longer a threat to society.

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