Dismissal of lawsuit against FBI leaves SC’s Taylor family let down again | Opinion

After spending several years falsely accused of horrific crimes, the Taylor family has been let down by the legal system once again, this time by the dismissal of its lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 2016, the FBI claimed Timothy Shaun Taylor and Timothy Dashaun Taylor of McCellanville had kidnapped, raped and murdered 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel in 2009 when she was on spring break in Myrtle Beach. The FBI’s story had the Taylors hoping to use Drexel for sex trafficking but instead murdering the teenager after gang raping her. They then supposedly fed her body to alligators.

It was all a lie, conjured up by a prison informant whose fable FBI agents believed and began spreading publicly. That was despite the fact that the police had long before confirmed that the Taylors had a strong alibi, that they could not have committed the crime because they were in Edisto for a car show, a drive of several hours away from Myrtle Beach when it occurred.

No matter. The FBI told that lie to a judge while trying to pressure Dashaun into providing information he didn’t have. That lie nearly destroyed the Taylors. Friends and community members shunned them for years. They lost jobs and so many other opportunities that they could barely make ends meet or even repair a hole in their roof. Their physical and mental health was negatively affected, but despite it all, the FBI refused to offer as much as an apology.

The FBI still hasn’t. All indications suggest it never will. And neither will law enforcement officials from Myrtle Beach to Charleston who worked on the case alongside the FBI.

It’s beyond a travesty. It’s injustice in the extreme.

The real rapist and murderer was a man named Raymond Moody, a high-level sexual predator who spent two decades in a California prison for attacking several girls and teenagers. He spent years denying anything to do with the horrific things done to Drexel, then confessed in 2022. Moody is now serving a life sentence, and his live-in girlfriend Angel Vause is serving 18 years for her role. She, too, lied for years before pleading guilty and being sentenced in February.

The Taylors had nothing to do with Drexel’s disappearance. We know that with certainty. That should have been enough to convince the FBI and local prosecutors and police to make that clear to the public, to make amends for the damage caused to an innocent family.

The family’s lawsuit was a way to hold at least the FBI to account. But District Court Judge Bruce Hendricks recently tossed it, ruling that the FBI is protected by immunity and delivering another blow to a family that has endured far too many.

Immunity is a sensible legal standard to protect law enforcement from frivolous lawsuits. The Taylors and their lawyer Ryan McKaig are not against law enforcement immunity, but they believe it is being abused in this case because the FBI didn’t make a simple mistake. It willfully fingered the Taylors and pressured them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit for several years after the men had long established an airtight alibi.

That won’t be the end of the story, though. The Taylors plan to appeal, even if their uphill legal battle has to reach the Supreme Court.

“This case raises fundamental questions of liberty,” McKaig told me.

“Are we a free people who tolerate certain governmental immunities, knowing good-faith mistakes will inevitably be made because a government is necessary to protect our liberties?” McKaig asked. “Or are we a subjected people condemned to suffer the cruelties of a government that is immunized for its intentional and bad-faith abuses? It cannot be the latter.”

It must not be the latter.

Many of us have been rightly horrified in recent days, seeing law enforcement officials snatch legal immigrants off the street and send others to prisons far away after denying them due process. It’s a sign of a crumbling democracy, one that no longer respects the rule of law.

While we fight those abuses, we must not forget that there are other long-standing travesties in a legal system that has for far too long treated families like the Taylors as second-class citizens.

This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Dismissal of lawsuit against FBI leaves SC’s Taylor family let down again | Opinion."