In Rolling Meadows in August 2006, two men burst into an apartment, ordered the six occupants to the floor, robbed them and, according to police and court records, shot a popular suburban rap artist when he struggled to open a bedroom safe.
Marquis Lovings, 30, who rapped under the name Keyz, was killed and another man was wounded.
About a year later, Rolling Meadows police arrested Patrick Taylor, then a 38-year-old Chicago man, after receiving a tip and subsequently showing a photo array and then a live lineup to the surviving witnesses.
A jury convicted Taylor of murder in 2011 after a trial in which prosecutors presented a case reliant on the eyewitness testimony. He was sentenced to life in prison, though prosecutors initially sought the death penalty before it was abolished in Illinois.
Now, more than 15 years after the suburban home invasion, the case is back in court, beset with allegations that police and prosecutors hid “tubs of evidence” for years that could point to Taylor’s innocence.
The case is at least the second in recent months in which defense attorneys have publicly accused prosecutors of withholding evidence in cases they argue do not hold up to scrutiny. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently reassigned two prosecutors who were trying cases against three defendants accused of killing Chicago police Officer Clifton Lewis in 2011, amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by defense attorneys related to evidence issues.
The Taylor case was first pitched back to Cook County courts for a new trial in 2016 by an Illinois appeals court, which ruled that a judge should have allowed Taylor’s lawyers to present testimony from an expert about the potential pitfalls of eyewitness identification.
In the ensuing years, Taylor has not yet gone to trial, with defense attorneys asking Cook County prosecutors to dismiss the case, pointing to what they say are a litany of problems. Among them:
— A live lineup in which witnesses viewed Taylor while he was strapped down to a gurney in a state of distress, despite advice from eyewitness experts that police should ensure suspects in lineups don’t stand out from others being used as filler.
— A ballistics match to the gun used in a shooting of a Chicago police officer about four months before the home invasion in which the officer identified a different suspect, who resembles a composite sketch in the home invasion case.
— A “three-inch file” compiled by a Rolling Meadows detective on an alternative suspect that defense attorneys say was improperly withheld until last month, when a court issued an order allowing attorneys to inspect police files. The suspect has ties to the person identified by the police officer as his shooter, defense attorneys say, and police reports show the man owned a car similar to one captured on video in the vicinity of the home invasion.
Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Clarke disputed in court that he withheld the police files, arguing that the Police Department did not tender the files in question to the state. Prosecutors have further argued that illegal guns get passed around all the time. They have sought to exclude the sketch, as well as mentions of suspects in other shootings related to the gun.
A spokeswoman from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said the office can’t comment on pending litigation. Rolling Meadows police officials did not respond to a request for comment.
“They withheld a lot of evidence. That is troubling,” said Elliot Slosar, one of Taylor’s attorneys, adding that prosecutors have tried to exclude evidence that could point to the other suspects. “It’s really inconsistent with a search for the truth.”
A group of friends gathered at Lovings’ apartment on Aug. 19, 2006, when, as police reports describe, a brutal home invasion unfolded in a suburb with infrequent violent crime.
The two assailants barged in, beat the people in the home as they lay on the floor and placed pillows over their heads, the reports say.
The men demanded that Lovings unlock one bedroom safe, and grew angry when he failed to unlock a safe in a second room, witnesses told police. That’s when Lovings was shot and killed, according to the witnesses.
A second man was injured while trying to run away, and a day later described one of the attackers to a sketch artist.
Rolling Meadows police Detective Dan Cook had a break in the case that October, when one of the home invasion victims reported to police that he thought one of the attackers “might be someone known as ‘Black Pat’ who was living in Harvey,” according to the appeals court opinion. Cook determined “Black Pat” was Taylor and showed a photo array to the surviving witnesses of the home invasion, according to the court ruling.
All of the witnesses identified Taylor in the array except the man who was shot and injured, according to the opinion. That man was also the witness who described one of the assailants to the sketch artist.
Chicago and Rolling Meadows police arrested Taylor the following August at a gas station on the city’s South Side.
Rolling Meadows police brought the witnesses in for a live lineup, and Cook testified at trial that Taylor “started screaming, covering his face with his shirt, and crawling around the room,” according to the appeals court opinion, and that paramedics had to restrain him on a stretcher.
Police made an effort to showcase giving medical attention to the other stand-ins for the lineup, viewed by witnesses one by one.
Photographs of the men in the lineup included in defense materials show the men sitting down with paramedics while wearing a blood pressure cuffs.
In the lineup photo of Taylor, though, he is strapped to a gurney and appears to be flailing in distress.
An eyewitness expert retained by the defense to submit a report on the lineup wrote: “The investigators’ attempts to create a common appearance by having the EMT staff attend to the fillers is understandable,” a court document states, referring to the decoy suspects, “but one cannot escape the fact that Mr. Taylor had significant medical challenges and was an unlikely choice for a filler.”
Taylor’s original attorney sought to put an expert on the witness stand during the trial to testify about challenges related to relying on eyewitness testimony. The expert would have testified to factors that could cloud someone’s memory of an event, such as trauma and lighting, as well as circumstances around photo arrays and lineups that can bias witnesses.
The appeals court ordered a new trial for Taylor, who benefited from an Illinois Supreme Court ruling earlier that year that held that defendants should be allowed to bring such expert witnesses when cases rely on eyewitness testimony.
“We have not only seen that eyewitness identifications are not always as reliable as they appear, but we also have learned, from a scientific standpoint, why this is often the case,” the opinion in the case read.
About five months after Taylor was arrested and charged with murder, Chicago police in January 2008 executed a search on the West Side and recovered a gun. They arrested and charged a man with illegally possessing the gun and ran forensics, according to details laid out in a motion filed in 2018 by prosecutors in the Taylor case.
It matched the gun used in the Rolling Meadows homicide — as well as a homicide in 2001 and shootings in 2003 and 2006.
Wounded in the April 2006 shooting by the gun was a Chicago police officer, who, according to a Chicago Police Department report, identified another suspect in a lineup.
In the motion, prosecutors asked a judge to bar the defense from presenting evidence about the other crimes, arguing that “the fact that someone other than the defendant may have used the handgun in question at entirely different periods of time has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the defendant used a handgun on the night of this offense.”
Rolling Meadows police reports indicate that Cook, the detective, followed up on the gun in 2009, while Taylor was awaiting trial. Cook interviewed the man arrested with the gun, who reported he received the weapon from an alleged Gangster Disciple member. He reported getting the gun while another man was present, the report said. Cook interviewed the second man, who corroborated the story, according to the reports.
The man arrested with the gun was “shown a photo of Patrick Taylor, and advised he had never seen Patrick Taylor,” the Rolling Meadows report said.
Taylor’s defense attorneys alleged in a motion to dismiss filed last month that the man whom the police officer identified as his shooter is the “true killer” of Lovings, and has connections to the Gangster Disciples street gang, along with the man who reportedly gave the gun to the person eventually arrested with it.
Regarding the second man, the attorneys further alleged in a motion for discovery that prosecutors and Rolling Meadows police did not turn over a hefty file of investigative materials on the man that was compiled by police, in violation of Maryland v. Brady, the U.S. Supreme Court case requiring prosecutors and law enforcement to turn over any potentially exculpatory material.
“The state’s callous positions are contrary to its ethical obligations … and infringe upon Mr. Taylor’s constitutional rights in multiple respects,” the motion to dismiss reads. “The egregious misconduct unraveling in this case warrants serious sanctions, including an evidentiary hearing and the dismissal of charges.”
A judge on April 5 granted a request from Taylor’s attorneys over the opposition of the state to physically review the investigative file at the Rolling Meadows Police Department, and the parties agreed the inspection would happen after the next court date on April 12, according to a defense motion to compel discovery.
Two days later, Clarke, the prosecutor, offered Taylor a deal to plead guilty to aggravated battery and receive a sentence about equal to the time he’d already served. The offer would expire on the morning of April 12, before the defense team could review the file, according to the motion and hearing transcripts.
With prodding from the judge, Clarke gave the parties more time to consider the offer, which still remains open, according to hearing transcripts and Slosar.
After reviewing the police files, defense attorneys wrote in the motion that they uncovered “exculpatory evidence,” particularly pointing to a raft of police files related to one of the men connected to the gun used in the home invasion.
The file — which attorneys said was not turned over during previous discovery periods in the past 16 years — shows that Cooke requested information on the man from a Chicago police database.
Among information in the file, according to the defense motion to dismiss, is a red-light camera photo near the crime scene that captured a vehicle that matches the description of a vehicle described to police by witnesses near the building around the time of the home invasion. The file also includes a public records report that indicated the man owned a similar car.
“Although Detective Cook conducted an intense investigation into (the man), when his leads failed to connect Mr. Taylor to (him), he simply buried the evidence,” the motion to dismiss reads.
Clarke, who was also the original prosecutor on the case, said in court that police never gave the files to the state, but defense attorneys in motions included a 2020 email from Clarke, where he wrote in response to a discovery request that he “conducted a search for any of these materials that may be in the possession of the Rolling Meadows Police Department and the Streamwood Police Department.”
When presented with a plea deal that would get him out of prison, Taylor, wrestled with the decision, according to transcripts.
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“I’m gonna say this — I really truly believe that with the right jury, it’s impossible for me to lose,” he told a judge. “But because I have a family and I’ve been gone for almost 16 years, wrongfully convicted, I’m willing to do exactly what they need done. What they need done is me out of jail. This is what attorneys do. Attorneys is to help you get out of jail. And sometimes … these are the breaks.”
Taylor hasn’t accepted the deal, and his attorneys are hoping to get the case tossed. But the deal, according to Slosar, remains on the table while the attorneys finish going through the evidence they say was withheld.
Taylor’s daughter was in eighth grade when her father was arrested. Ashley Redd remembers trips to the mall and Dave & Buster’s with her dad, until one day, she said, he was swept out of her life.
“He missed a lot of my life, marriage, graduation,” she said, noting her father was behind bars when she graduated from high school and got her bachelor’s degree. “It’s huge. That’s a lot.”
They’ve stayed in touch by phone, and she hopes to see him as a free man once again.
Her own daughter is graduating kindergarten later this month. She’s holding onto hope that perhaps her father will see that milestone.