‘He was in a lot of pain’ Mother says of man now in jail after being cleared of wrongful conviction

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Jacksonville man who served 33 years for a wrongful conviction is now back behind bars after police said he shot a man on the Eastside.

Edward Taylor is in jail on an attempted murder charge after a shooting Friday night, about one month after he was exonerated.

Read: Man convicted in 1986 sexual assault of 4-year-old girl exonerated after wrongful conviction

“My heart is being stripped out into pieces. I can’t explain to anybody how I feel,” Agnes Anderson, Tayor’s mother, said.

She worked for years to clear her son’s name after he was wrongfully charged for sexually assaulting a then-4-year-old. Anderson told Action News Jax’s Robert Grant that while he walked a free man, he still held onto the emotional trauma from being in prison.

Anderson said she witnessed the struggles her innocent son endured after so many years behind bars.

“I was there the entire time. I know a lot of the hurt and pain,” she said. “I don’t know what he was going through in his mind, but I know he was in a lot of pain, mental pain. I told him, ’You really have got to go back to that therapist.’”

She said the 57-year-old stopped seeing his therapist shortly before the alleged shooting.

According to court documents, surveillance video shows Taylor walk up to the victim and shoot him in the chest. He then drives off in his car while a group of men fire at him. Police said the victim had non-life-threatening injuries.

Anderson said he left the house Friday night to go play pool with friends.

“He got out, and I don’t know if he got up with the wrong people that he started hanging around with or what.”

Taylor is now in jail on more than $1 million in bond.

The State Attorney’s Office said he was wrongfully convicted after the victim of the sexual assault misidentified him for his brother, who is currently serving a life sentence for armed robbery in Georgia. After Taylor was released on parole in 2019, the office investigated, and the court overturned the conviction.

A representative said the office stands by its work and will review this new charge.

The Innocence Project of Florida also worked on the case. In a statement, Executive Director Seth Miller said, “The collaborative effort to both free and vacate the wrongful conviction of Edward Taylor required years of painstaking, diligent and thorough investigation by state and defense entities. We stand by that work and result. We cannot predict the future, and our focus at the Innocence Project of Florida is squarely on freeing the wrongfully convicted, because that is what justice demands. With the end of the post-conviction process, so too ended our representation of Mr. Taylor. It is inappropriate to comment on this new, unrelated pending matter.”

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