On Wednesday, Pine Bluff suffered another tragedy. Maurice Taggart and his son, Justice Taggart, were said by police to be struggling over a gun when both were shot. The elder Taggart, age 43, died. The son was taken to the hospital where he was listed in stable condition.
In some ways, the incident was like others. People get into squabbles in Pine Bluff, across Arkansas and throughout the country. And because there seems to be a handgun in every purse, on every hip and in every drawer, those dust-ups turn lethal when one or both parties reach for their weapons.
Elements of the Taggart shooting, however, elevate the story, for better or worse. Maurice Taggart had been around the block a few times, having worked for politicians and in other public circles. He was a local lad, having gone to school at Pine Bluff High School.
After he took over as head of the Urban Renewal Agency, a city office with close ties to Go Forward Pine Bluff, he said he was glad to be back in the mix of things in Pine Bluff and looked forward to giving back to his community.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As he worked at his day job, he was also pursuing a career in law. And when he secured his license, he left Urban Renewal and put his shingle out as a local attorney. All in all, he became quite the public figure.
Then the rumors started that money was missing from Urban Renewal and that the State Police were involved in the investigation. Eventually, charges came down, and Taggart and another man living in Texas, a high school classmate, were indicted in June on dozens of charges in connection with close to $700,000 in missing money.
His story sounds like a Southern tragedy because it is one. Good guy, handsome, always smiling — even when he was booked into the county jail and had a mug shot taken — easy to talk to, married to the county clerk. Then all gone bad and then worse.
We’d all like to know exactly what happened to him, but Police Chief Denise Richardson made some statements last week that makes us wonder if that will happen. She went on the radio and publicly absolved Taggart’s son as a suspect. We respect the police, but the statement was made on Thursday before Taggart’s body had even been taken to the state Crime Laboratory, where, as the police like to say in press releases, the cause and manner of death will be determined.
If the cause and manner of death have not been determined, how can a police department investigating that person’s untimely death reach any conclusion about what and who and how?
Perhaps the chief’s feelings of compassion for the family got out beyond her commitment to her badge and the people of Pine Bluff who deserve to know the truth and to Maurice Taggart, who, like anyone else, is owed the utmost in diligence in determining how it all went down.
If that is the case or if that is what the case appears to be, a better course would be to turn the matter over to the Arkansas State Police. We doubt seriously that if they were in charge, they would publicly say who is or isn’t a suspect. That’s just not the way a prudent police department operates.