Series of poor choices end in tragedy

After days of testimony and deliberations, jurors in the Tahliek Taliaferro death case said they eventually came to see the tragic shootings as a sudden flare-up of reckless conduct that grew from a long-standing feud between Taliaferro and Joey Parrish.

The entire incident might never have occurred had it not been for a series of coincidental events, jurors said.

"I couldn't help thinking, if Tahliek and his friends had stayed at the ice-cream place just a minute or two longer, probably nothing would have happened," said a female juror.

Joey Parrish was a friend of Taliaferro's onetime girlfriend, a young woman who occasionally had been beaten by Taliaferro, she testified at trial. When Parrish found out, he became a thorn in Taliaferro's side, repeatedly taunting him and challenging him to fight it out with their fists.

That condition persisted for some two years until June 24 last year when the two angry parties found themselves a matter of yards apart.

One group consisted of Taliaferro and five of his friends, and the other was made up of Joey Parrish, his older cousin, Ethan Parrish, and a female friend of theirs, Stephanie Reynolds. The Parrishes had been drinking and taking hallucinogens much of the day, according to trial testimony.

The evening confrontation began at a Bruster's Ice Cream shop at Flat Rock, where Taliaferro and his friends relaxed eating ice cream after an afternoon of basketball.

The Parrish group rolled up at an adjoining gas station.

A minutes-long exchange of taunts, gestures and posturing followed and at one point, Reynolds testified, she stopped Ethan, 25, from leaving the car with a handgun.

Several minutes later, Reynolds hastily sped away with the two cousins, drove west in U.S. 60 toward her home, but then was ordered to turn around by the Parrishes, notably Ethan.

As she drove back east, she noticed Taliaferro and his friends in two cars leaving the parking area at Bruster's and heading west. The Taliaferro vehicles also turned around at a crossover, possibly to follow the Parrishes.

Prosecution witnesses, friends of Taliaferro, gave a range of reasons for the turnaround. But one said he remembered Taliaferro rubbing his hands together, relishing a fight.

Testimony showed that in the past, Taliaferro and carloads of associates had stalked Joey Parrish, daring him to engage in a fight. Most times the scrawny teenager hid in the woods.

The cars carrying Taliaferro and the Parrishes met for the second time June 24 about a mile south of the initial confrontation after Reynolds pulled into a driveway at a horse farm.

Along the way, Ethan Parrish had readied a MAK-90 semiautomatic rifle, loading an 83-round capacity drum magazine. And after the car rolled into the driveway, Ethan ordered his cousin to cover the license plate of the car with a plastic bag.

Before the Parrish car pulled to a stop awaiting the expected arrival of Taliaferro, Ethan Parrish bemoaned the history of insults heaped on his cousin.

"He is sick of everybody picking on Joey," Reynolds told the jury, referring to Ethan. "I know Ethan said he wanted to smoke these [guys] and take care of this and finish this."

On the stand, Ethan denied that he said "smoke."

"He was just ready to end the battle. . . . I mean, he was ready to scare these boys," Reynolds testified.

She acknowledged that Ethan never specifically said he wanted to shoot anyone or kill anyone. And Ethan testified: "Wanting to end it and wanting to kill somebody is two totally different things."

As the Parrish car rolled past the Taliaferro group on Route 60, Joey Parrish had exacerbated the situation by waving his arms out the window, directing that they follow behind.

Minutes later in the driveway at the horse farm, Joey covered the license plate, a black gun in his hand, Reynolds said.

And he paused to throw a finger up at the approaching Taliaferro vehicle.

Joey jumped back in the car as Taliaferro rolled up inside the first of two cars. A friend named Lawrence Harris was driving, and Taliaferro, in the front passenger seat, started laughing. The car was barely moving forward, some witnesses said.

"He was kind of saying he wasn't scared, I guess," Reynolds said of Taliaferro. "That's how I took it. And Ethan [hanging out a back window of the car he was in loosely holding the MAK] pulled the trigger."

Six shots were fired in quick succession from the rifle as the car driven by Harris pulled away at full speed.

Two shots hit the pavement and four more plowed through the rear of the car. Taliaferro, leaning over toward the driver to avoid the gunfire, took a shot to the left side of the head, through his baseball cap.

Another bullet ripped through passenger Courtney Jones' midsection. Jones was in the rear seat with another young man.

Ethan Parrish said the gun rose up on him -- that he only meant to frighten, not harm.

"I was scared to death," Ethan told the jury, after noting earlier that Joey had told him Lawrence Harris was known to carry a handgun.

"When [Harris] passed [the driveway] he pulled up a handgun and pointed it, leaned back over the seat, back over the passenger side seat, and pointed directly out the window at me," Ethan said.

That's when he started firing. "All six shots were fired as fast as the gun could shoot them," Ethan Parrish said, describing an awkward firing position as he hung out the window.

Had he purposefully fired into the car?

"I just stuck it out [the window] and shot," he said. "It rose on me; I lost control of the gun."

Reynolds slammed her car in reverse, ending up between the car driven by Harris and a second car carrying two other members of the Taliaferro party. Harris sped off to a subdivision about a mile away, where a resident called police.

Reynolds drove to the nearby home of friends, where she and the cousins showered, hid their weapons and prepared to leave for Canada.

Taliaferro lay dead in the front seat of Harris' car; Jones was bleeding profusely and had to be airlifted to VCU Medical Center.

A deputy found a handgun at Taliaferro's feet, a BB gun that was a lookalike copy of a semi-automatic handgun.

The deputy lifted the gun barehanded from the floor and placed it on the roof of the vehicle. It later turned up in the trunk, and had been wiped clean of fingerprints. There has never been an explanation of how the most important self-defense exhibit in the case briefly disappeared.

Reynolds surrendered to authorities four days after the shooting and began cooperating with investigators. The Parrishes turned themselves in hours later on the same day.

More than 1,000 people attended Taliaferro's funeral, filling the Powhatan High School auditorium.

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .