Now that Prosecuting Attorney Kyle Hunter has made his determination not to file charges in the shooting death of Maurice Taggart, the case file is an open book. The Commercial asked for the file and the prosecutor’s office complied. Thank you, Mr. Hunter.
In today’s edition, a fair amount of that information is made available to our readers, including a new segment of “The Newsroom” devoted to an analysis of the case with Dr. Matthew Pate, a criminologist who has 25 years of law enforcement experience. There is also a timeline of crime scene events and a lengthy story on much of the evidence in the case file.
As we have heard numerous times from various law enforcement officials and from Hunter himself, no investigation is perfect, meaning rarely is all the information that one would hope for in the file.
That said, there are “gaps,” as Pate put it, in the investigation that cry out for more detail. On the top of that list is an eyewitness who said she saw three men fighting — Maurice Taggart, his son, Justice Taggart, and an unidentified third male. That man, according to the witness, took off his shirt and gave it to Justice Taggart.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
This witness was not someone who got a glimpse of a speeding getaway car and was asked how many people were inside. This is someone who said they were up at 2 a.m. when the incident took place and who immediately went to the window and watched the altercation unfold for several minutes.
The shirtless man was also seen by another witness who described the man in some detail and wondered at the time if the police knew he was there, on the side of the house, away from the crime scene.
And yet Hunter dismissed the idea of a third person, saying that the person’s existence was not substantiated by other witnesses and not seen on body cam footage from police personnel. There were, however, no statements in the file from witnesses that spoke to a possible third person, and the fact that the person was not shown on body cam footage could simply mean that the person had fled the scene by the time police arrived.
There was also the state Crime Laboratory report that said the two bullets that struck Taggart hit him in the back and were not fired at close range — even though the police narrative of the scene was that Maurice Taggart and his son were struggling over a gun when Justice Taggart shot and killed his father.
There has been almost nothing about this case that seemed typical. From the apparent differences in what was said to have transpired and the evidence at the scene, to the police chief’s premature statement about the incident, to the victim himself, who alluded to other forces at play in a recorded statement taken months before the shooting, the twists and turns have been many.
We said early on in this space that the matter would have been better placed with the Arkansas State Police. We stand by that. The Taggart family had close associations with many individuals in town. Shawndra Taggart, Maurice Taggart’s wife, is an elected official, serving as the county clerk. Maurice Taggart was the head of a powerful agency at one time and then became an attorney.
When he was charged with embezzlement, all of the local judges recused themselves because of their associations with him. We believe that would have been the prudent move for Hunter as well, both for that case and the homicide case, and that a special prosecutor should have been brought in.
This may be the end of the matter, but that does not mean the case is necessarily settled in the public’s mind. If the case is picked up by another agency and if there is a special prosecutor, this would seem a good opportunity to turn the facts over to a grand jury to see what they think happened. That’s a lot of “ifs” and that exercise, if it happened, could lead us right back to where we are today. But as it stands, the jury is still out on this case.