Jury selection is set to begin Monday for the trial of Austin police officer Christopher Taylor in a 2019 killing.
Prosecutors hope to persuade the jury to convict Taylor of deadly misconduct for his role in the fatal shooting of Mauris DeSilva, a Sri Lankan scientist and researcher who had been threatening himself with a knife at his downtown apartment when officers arrived. Police said DeSilva had taken a step or two toward officers with the knife at his side when he was shot.
Nearly two years after the incident, a grand jury returned a murder and deadly misconduct indictment against Taylor and officer Karl Krycia, who also shot DeSilva. A trial date has not been set in Krycia’s case.
Prosecutors announced last week that they would not pursue the murder charge against Taylor, only the lesser charge of deadly misconduct, a third-degree felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said prosecutors would not comment on pending matters. A lawyer representing DeSilva’s family in a civil lawsuit said this decision was probably made because a jury would be more likely to convict on the lesser charge.
The trial is expected to last three weeks, with opening statements likely to begin Wednesday.
This is the second trial Taylor has faced in a year. He was charged with murder in the killing of Michael Ramos in 2020. The jury in that trial deadlocked on whether he committed murder, and the Travis County district attorney announced that prosecutors would drop the case after a grand jury chose not to return new indictments.
Attorneys Doug O’Connell and Ken Ervin are representing Taylor in the DeSilva case and did so last year in the Ramos case as well.
In a pretrial hearing Friday, O’Connell and Ervin said they had evidence that in 2020, the district attorney’s office, then led by Margaret Moore, had decided not to pursue an indictment against Taylor or Krycia for killing DeSilva after a separate investigation into the incident.
O’Connell said in a statement that the shooting was justified because DeSilva approached officers with a deadly weapon.
“The facts of the case didn’t change, the only thing that changed was José Garza’s politics and his overwhelming urge to prosecute police officers,” he wrote, referring to the current Travis County district attorney.
The trial will be another test for Garza’s administration, specifically the civil rights unit, on whether it can secure a conviction against a police officer. So far, it has been unsuccessful in obtaining a single conviction in the more than two dozen cases it has brought against police officers.
Holding police accountable became an issue that helped Garza secure his victory in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Garza has said the outcomes of these trials highlight the complexities of prosecuting police officers.
What happened?
Officers were sent to the Spring Condominiums on Bowie Street, near West Third Street, about 5 p.m. July 31, 2019, after reports of a man with a large kitchen knife threatening himself.
A wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of DeSilva’s family said a neighbor called 911 and said DeSilva was having “another mental episode.” Austin police had responded to multiple mental health incidents involving DeSilva, including one in 2015 involving a knife and others in the months before his death, the lawsuit said.
Then-Police Chief Brian Manley said witnesses saw DeSilva on the day of his death banging on the emergency exit doors and later holding a knife to his neck in the elevator.
When officers arrived, police said, they began speaking with the condo staff in the lobby and putting together a plan to safely get him out. At that time, staffers told police they had seen DeSilva waving the knife around at the cameras in the condo’s gym on the fifth floor.
The four responding officers then took the elevator to the gym. When they stepped off, one officer was holding a Taser, and two others, Taylor and Krycia, had their firearms drawn, the lawsuit says.
Officers saw DeSilva at the end of the hall holding a “large kitchen knife” to his neck, Manley said. He was about 7 to 10 feet from the officers, according to Manley.
Officers told DeSilva to drop the knife, the chief said. DeSilva dropped the knife to his side and then took a step or two forward, and that’s when one officer fired his Taser and the other two fired their guns, Manley said.
DeSilva was taken to a hospital, where he later died.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: APD officer Christopher Taylor’s trial for 2019 shooting begins Monday