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Four Wheels, No Breaks

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The house is a compact ranch on a street where rims are stolen off cars in broad daylight. Michael Bowen, the current owner, bought the house nine months ago. Bowen says McFarlane left plenty behind when he moved out.

"I found at least 200 pairs of Timberlands, all brand-new, never been worn," says Bowen, referring to expensive and trendy hiking boots. "He left closets full of new clothes, fashionable stuff that didn't fit me, unfortunately. There were hundreds of photographs of people with machine guns and naked women sitting on their laps, boxes of photographs that I finally threw away a couple months ago."

In a laundry room near an in-ground pool, Bowen pulls down a box, which he opens to reveal shiny rows of ammunition.

"There were buckets of bullets when I moved in here," he says. "Buckets! Shotgun shells, handgun shells, machine gun, everything. Bullets in the shed, in every bedroom, everywhere, thousands of bullets."

In a maroon storage shed located in the back yard, Bowen says he unearthed cases of hard liquor. He points at a red Igloo cooler splattered with mud.

"That's where I found the marijuana, at least a pound of it," he says. "This was a party crib, for sure."

When McFarlane woke up June 1, he discovered the ATVs were missing. He and a friend drove around the neighborhood looking for the vehicles, according to Carhart. They did not call the police.

"Any citizen knows that the police would not treat stolen ATVs as exactly a top priority," Carhart says. "And the bikes were brand-new, so [Taylor] didn't have titles yet. He didn't have VIN numbers, either, because the paperwork was still in transit."

McFarlane hadn't found the ATVs by the time he finally called Taylor. But he had developed a suspect: Ryan Hill.

Hill spent the afternoon of June 1 hanging outside the house where he lived at the time. The house — tan in color, a dirt yard, a satellite dish stuck to a flat roof — was a place for guys with street names like Cheese, Roach, and Fat Boy to gather and play videogames.

Taylor's blue Yukon Denali cruised by the house multiple times. After several more drive-bys, the SUV stopped on the street. Hill approached the vehicle to ask Taylor what he wanted.

"He started talking nasty and stuff, talking about how öThe police can't touch me. I own this town. Where's my shit?'" said Hill in a deposition.

According to Hill and other witnesses, Taylor exited his truck, pulled a gun out of his waistband, and pointed it at several people. Taylor has consistently denied there were any guns present at the altercation.

"When [Taylor] pulled up, he jumped out of his car," said Gardner. "When he jumped out of his car, [a] black Altima pulled up. That's when the guy, he had a chopper.

"They call it a chopper, but it was an M-16."

"You give Sean back his shit," the man said in a thick Jamaican accent, according to state witnesses. "Give him back his shit or we are going to kill you."

Hill, Gardner, and the others claimed to not have the ATVs.

"So [Taylor] was like, 'I'm going to come back and I'm going to kill all you niggers,'" said Nashea Herlong, one of the state's witnesses.

Ten minutes after his initial quarrel with Ryan Hill, Sean Taylor did come back, as promised. He brought with him what has been labeled "a posse" of men in other cars. Witnesses claim he remained armed. He again confronted Hill and his friends.

"[Taylor was] just jumping up, like in a football game. He was just jumping up, like hyped!" Hill said. "Then he just swung at me when he got across the street. I fought him back. Real good too."

As Taylor and Hill tussled, Charles Caughman, a nineteen-year-old from Baltimore who was visiting McFarlane, attacked one of Hill's friends with a black aluminum baseball bat, prosecutors claim.

Members of both parties scattered. Hill, in flip-flops, ran from Taylor. Taylor and his posse returned to their cars and drove back to McFarlane's house, several blocks north. Taylor's Yukon and the black Nissan Altima were parked in front of the house.

According to police, Caughman said he was sitting in the living room. McFarlane, standing next to Caughman, was talking on the phone and looking out the front window. A silver car pulled up. Caughman saw hands poke out of the car's windows. McFarlane noticed guns and dove to the floor. Taylor's Yukon, the black Altima, and a third car in front of the house were sprayed with bullets.

The Yukon was struck at least fifteen times. Police recovered 27 bullet cases, 19 of which were from 7.62-caliber bullets, the type used by an AK-47. The other bullets were .40 caliber, the kind used in a semiautomatic handgun. One of the bullets matched another used in a robbery that occurred a half-mile away.

Taylor was not at the house when police arrived.

"It was something about not waiting around to be shot," says Carhart. Also not there was the Jamaican man whom Hill and others said assaulted them with an M-16. McFarlane and his friends refused to allow police to search the house.

"They became extremely sarcastic, every single one of them. They were extremely uncooperative, okay?" said Ofcr. Anne Robinson in a deposition.

Three days after the shooting, Taylor surrendered at a police substation near West Perrine. He posted a $16,500 bond and was released from custody. He subsequently pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.

Mike Grieco was the assistant state attorney who initially tried to convict Taylor. In the four years since he'd graduated from the University of Miami School of Law, Grieco had established himself as The NFL Guy at the State Attorney's Office. In addition to prosecuting Taylor, Grieco had assumed the prosecution of former Oakland Raider Barret Robbins, who has bipolar disorder and was shot by Miami Beach Police last year after he broke into the building that houses the nightclub Mansion.

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