Posted on 08/26/2016 6:21:44 PM PDT by Gamecock
A teenage girl who disappeared from Myrtle Beach seven years ago was abducted, gang-raped, shot to death and thrown into an alligator-infested swamp in the dense forests near McClellanville, according to the FBI.
FBI agent Gerrick Munoz this week gave the first detailed account of what investigators think happened to 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel after she disappeared in 2009. His account, contained in a federal court transcript obtained by The Post and Courier, is based on a statement from a prison inmate who claims he was present when she was killed.
But a McClellanville woman whose husband and son have been implicated by the inmate says the story is just a bunch of “craziness” adopted by federal authorities desperate to solve a vexing case.
For years, tips repeatedly have sent state and local investigators on wild goose chases from Myrtle Beach to McClellanville searching in vain for clues to the young woman’s disappearance or her remains.
A major break came earlier this year when an inmate who had recently been imprisoned to serve a 25-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter gave a “jailhouse confession,” telling authorities that he witnessed what happened to the girl.
In the transcript, Munoz testifies that the inmate, Taquan Brown of Walterboro, told investigators he went to a “stash house” in the McClellanville area in the days after Drexel was abducted. As he entered the house with a couple of other men, he saw Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor, then 16, “sexually abusing Brittanee Drexel,” the agent said.
The FBI agent gave the following account of what the inmate said happened next:
He spotted others also in the room with the girl and Da’Shaun Taylor, and he kept walking through the house to the backyard to give some money to Da’Shaun Taylor’s father, Shaun Taylor.
As the two talked, Drexel ran from the house. She was “pistol-whipped” and taken back inside.
Two shots rang out and the inmate assumed Shaun Taylor shot the girl. Then the girl’s body was wrapped up and taken away.
Asked what happened to the girl’s body, the FBI agent testified that it has not been found but that “several witnesses have told us Miss Drexel’s body was placed in a pit, or gator pit, to have her body disposed of. Eaten by the gators.”
Munoz told the court that investigators have searched several alligator ponds to no avail. He said investigators have been told that the area is peppered with as many as 40 of these ponds. Investigators also have searched the stash house, the agent testified. ‘Showed her off’
Since June when authorities held a news conference revealing their belief that the teen was held captive in McClellanville for days until she was killed, tips from people with “tidbits” and “secondhand information” have been coming in, the FBI agent testified.
Some of those tips corroborate the jailhouse confession, including secondhand information from an inmate in the Georgetown County jail, the agent said.
That prisoner provided authorities with details of what he was told happened to Drexel in the days after April 25, 2009, when a video camera recorded her leaving the beach-side Blue Water Hotel in Myrtle Beach. She had gone there against her parents’ permission from their home in Rochester, N.Y., earlier that month because she wanted to spend time in the warmth of the Grand Strand during spring break. But she vanished during the trip, her last cellphone signal pinging from the McClellanville area.
The Georgetown prisoner told authorities that Da’Shaun Taylor picked Drexel up in Myrtle Beach and took her to McClellanville. There he “showed her off, introduced her to some other friends that were there … they ended up tricking her out with some of their friends, offering her to them and getting a human trafficking situation,” the FBI agent testified.
By that point, the prisoner said, searches for the missing teen had generated massive media publicity. That created a problem for her abductors and she was “murdered and disposed of,” the agent told the court.
Both the FBI and federal prosecutors declined this week to discuss the jailhouse confession, Munoz’s testimony or the hunt for Drexel.
The young woman’s family could not be reached for comment Friday. The squeeze is on
The FBI agent’s testimony came out during a bond hearing on an unusual charge against Da’Shaun Taylor that his attorney, David Aylor, characterized in the transcript as “clearly nothing but a squeeze-job” designed to pressure him into confessing and helping the government.
Aylor argued that despite the jailhouse confession, investigators have not been able to generate any hard evidence or cooperation from others who reportedly saw the girl. As a result, he said, federal prosecutors pulled out an unusual legal tactic in an effort to force Taylor’s cooperation.
Federal prosecutors obtained indictments in June charging Da’Shaun Taylor, 25, with interference of interstate commerce by threat or violence for his involvement in a 2011 robbery of a Mount Pleasant McDonald’s restaurant. Taylor was the getaway driver while two others held up the restaurant, one wounding the store manager with two non-life threatening gunshots.
Taylor confessed, cooperated with authorities and was sentenced to probation, which he has successfully completed. The gunman got a 25-year sentence and the other robber got six years, suspended after serving 10 months.
Under federal law, prosecutors have the authority to bring parallel charges when federal laws are violated along with state laws. They often did so during the civil rights movement, bringing rights violation charges against people freed from or not charged with state law violations.
What makes this case unusual is that the federal charges against Taylor involve virtually the same evidence as in the McDonald’s robbery for which he confessed and that he has long since completed his state sentence.
The federal charges, which include use of a deadly weapon, carry a potential life sentence.
In his argument at the federal bond hearing for Da’Shaun Taylor, Aylor said he shouldn’t be punished for something he’s already done his time for just because the government wants “to squeeze him” for something they can use to solve the Drexel case other than the testimony of a jailhouse rat and another guy in jail who heard a story.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday conceded as much during Taylor’s bond hearing. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Gordon Baker questioned him about “the real reason” the government brought the interstate commerce charges against Taylor so long after he was convicted in state court. She asked Holliday if the reason was because he is a suspect in the Drexel case.
“That would be one,” Holliday replied.
But Holliday said a federal provision also gives the government the ability to lodge federal charges when it believes the outcome in a state court has been fundamentally unfair. In Taylor’s case, Holliday said, the government brought the new charges because he got off so lightly for the McDonald’s robbery while the other two suspects got substantial sentences.
The judge ordered Taylor released on $10,000 bail, which he posted later in the day after the bond hearing.
Neither Aylor nor co-defense attorney Mark Peper, both of Charleston, would discuss Taylor’s case after the hearing.
Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, whose office handled the original state prosecution of Taylor, said Friday that federal prosecutors did not consult with her or her staff about their plans to bring new charges against him in connection with the 2011 holdup. She declined to comment further. It’s just craziness
Taylor’s mother, Joan Taylor, 44, of McClellanville, told The Post and Courier on Thursday that she’s talking out about the accusations because she believes the government is unjustly trying to “pin something else on him” based on a bogus jailhouse confession.
She was stunned during the bond hearing when she heard the FBI agent’s testimony that implicated both her son and husband in Drexel’s abduction, rape and murder. “I wanted to just scream and yell.” She called the inmate’s story and the fact that the government is running with it “craziness.” The crimes her husband and son have been implicated in are “not in our nature,” she said.
Neither her son nor her husband responded to requests for them to comment on the allegations, but Joan Taylor said her husband, a former merchant seaman who now works as a tow truck driver and mechanic, is “fed up with it and he thinks it’s crazy.”
She described her son as a hard-working young man who has matured into a good, caring person. She said he lost an arm in a childhood accident, works as a mechanic and takes care of a son, a daughter and his grandmother. He just wants to know why he’s been singled out this way, she said.
Petite, 17-year-old white girl runs off to Myrtle Beach (from New York), runs into some...local gentlemen...and the fairly predictable thing happens.
My first guess was that she was one of their girlfriends, but this was right behind it.
You’re not the only one.
Ya know? I feel similarly constrained.
How about the 15 year old blonde who was gang raped then set on fire.
They didn’t indict him for any of that.
Never seem to here about the other way around other than in liberal novels.
A KKK meeting is the safest place on earth. There will be more FBI undercover agents than real KKK. That is a good thing, as it is a vile organization in need of elimination.
However, I wonder why the FBI does not target leftist organizations such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Muslim organizations that openly display racial hatred? George Soros supports all three with money. George Soros is a far left man with great amounts of money. He is Jewish and betrayed Jews in Eastern Europe to the Nazis. He is a most evil man. In reality he is a communist but does not have an official card of the communist party in is wallet. A very evil man is he. The violence at Trump rallies was by groups he supports with money.
Actually I know the answer, “political correctness.” That is dictated by our president. He supports their ideology. The FBI can not go after these organizations because our President will not allow them. The FBI is under the Judicary and that is part of the executive branch, the executive branch is the President of the United States. The lack of prosecution of these very evil groups is a direct result of President Obama. This is what he wants.
When political correctness first appeared on the scene many years ago I found it amusing. The logic of the whole thing seemed odd and irrelevant.
I was very wrong. The political correctness movement is nothing but the mission to stop free speech and thought. It comes directly from Marxist ideology and was perfected by the communist Saul Alinsky in his book, “Rules for Radicals.”Hillary Clinton was one of his philosophical students and regarded him as a mentor. She actually wrote letters to Alinsky praising him and his logic.
Oddly political correctness is totally harmless without a compliant and complicate news media. If not for such it would be nothing but amusing jokes in a bar or dinner table as it was when first encountered many years ago. Today political correctness is a very powerful tool as the news media parrots and promotes this as truth and correct.
The United States will never be conquered by external forces, it may well be destroyed by corruption from within. This is what happened to Rome.
Below is a quote of Marco Cicero
” “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
He was a most wise man. Also below is a link to many of his quotes. Though the quotes are from 2073 years past they are perfectly applicable to today. He was a man of truth and logic. He was murdered for his adherence to Truth.
Things have not changed much in over 2000 years. If one does not know and understand history, you are condemned to repeat the errors of the past. However today, we have the capability in arms to make these errors not hundreds of thousands of deaths but billions.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13755.Marcus_Tullius_Cicero
If I had my way I would get rid of the whole rotten “nest” of them. This really burns me up.
Ping
bump
It is an equal crime committed by our legal system, that these types violent crimes are not handled with swift, equal, and violent prejudice.
It is likely true this young women went out of her way to experience no moral boundaries.
However, this does not somehow lessen what I believe to be the truly criminal and evil minds and intent of these out of control and rabid beasts. I don’t care what color or body type a person has, the crime should be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
The rod (physical pain) is for the back of fools because they will not comply or learn any other way.
I am not saying we know all individuals involved, but some really sick men (living their lives without moral boundaries) just got away with rape (torture), murder, and probably mutilation.
In another time, we would have had a much better chance of getting to the bottom of this, and establishing stronger deterrent.
Every generation of irresponsible and morally depraved individuals, breads and licenses the next generation of even greater irresponsibility and greater moral depravity!
The greater and more prevalent the immorality and depravity within the hearts of individuals in society, the weaker the deterrent becomes to criminal behavior through time. This includes heinous crime.
As usual, you can bet the Obamanation, DNC, media, and black racist organizations across America won’t be elevating this story, or any black on white crime story, to main stream anything.
Very true.
Yep. And these thugs are demanding justice. If there really was justice in this nation, there would be a lot fewer thugs.
Can any self respecting father seek his own justice? I say a definitive yes and should
The abuse and murder reminds of the Knoxville Horror.
The brutality and in in-humanity: ghastly.
You know, I thought about the Christian/Newsom murders and their abject brutality, and the similarity to this case. And to those two nuns in Mississippi.
The underlying problem that will not go away is that blacks as a race have not shown themselves able to function in a modern society. Degrees and exceptions yes, but the central fact remains.
This girl’s disappearance has taken on a mythology of it’s own in this area. (I live just north of Charleston in Summerville).
I don’t see her going willingly with these feral thugs. But I have learned not to believe any type of “jailhouse confession”. Lies.
ping
Jessica Chambers http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/02/24/suspect-reportedly-indicted-in-burning-death-mississippi-teen-jessica-chambers.html
Thank you.
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