Sheriff’s Office is sued for a home raid in West Oak Lane seeking a man who’d been dead for months

Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is facing a federal lawsuit stemming from a botched raid in which her deputies barged into a West Oak Lane home with a bench warrant for a man who had been shot to death five months earlier.

The officers were looking for Travys Taylor, 28, on the morning of March 25, 2022, for failing to appear in court on what the lawsuit stated were drug and trespassing charges.

Instead, they found Taylor’s distraught mother, Tysha Melton, and a memorial she had built in her son’s upstairs bedroom, with smiling photos of Taylor and a replica Eagles helmet sitting atop a box with his ashes.

Taylor had been killed in October 2021 after leaving a Kensington restaurant.

Melton said after she opened the door the officers charged into her home wearing tactical gear, guns in hand, and pushed her into a television stand. After realizing that her son was dead, they “quickly left the house, covering their badges as they scrambled out the door,” according to the lawsuit.

» READ MORE: April 2022: Philly officers raided a home looking for man who had died five months earlier

Melton’s lawsuit was filed last month against Bilal, one of her sergeants, unnamed law enforcement officers, and the city of Philadelphia. It alleges that Bilal’s staff failed to conduct a proper records search before the raid to determine that Taylor was deceased. Melton’s husband, Eliacin Juarbe, is also a plaintiff in the suit.

Bilal and lawyers for the city declined to comment on the lawsuit this week.

Bilal spokesperson Teresa Lundy has previously said that the operation had been initiated by the warrant unit of the Sheriff’s Office, which was joined by Probation and Parole and city police in conducting warrant sweeps.

“The Sheriff’s Office didn’t ‘fail,’” Lundy said in April 2022. She contended there was no mechanism for checking in advance of a raid to see whether someone wanted on a warrant had died.

But Melton’s suit contends that even the public-facing court docket stated at least as early as January 2022 that Taylor was dead.

“The Sheriff’s Department is responsible for these constitutional violations because they don’t give the proper training to their officers,” said Melton’s attorney, Mary LeMieux-Fillery.

It is unclear what changes, if any, the Sheriff’s Office made to reduce the likelihood of a similar mistake happening again.

Lundy said in 2022 that the office is “looking into having a conversation with the District Attorney’s Office and the courts to figure if a database can be created to combat this issue.”

Jane Roh, a spokesperson for District Attorney Larry Krasner, said on Friday that such a conversation never took place because the DA’s office has “no authorized role in that process.”

Philadelphia police had launched an Internal Affairs investigation to determine which police officers were involved in the raid and to what extent. Sgt. Eric Gripp, a police spokesperson, declined to comment this week on the outcome of that investigation, or the lawsuit. The Police Department is not named as a defendant in the suit.

Philadelphia Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said in 2022 that Taylor’s death was still under active investigation. Homicide detectives were not part of the raid, he said, but law enforcement officials should have checked to see whether Taylor was still alive or in custody.

“These are checks that are supposed to be made prior to any kind of warrant being served,” Smith said.

Gripp said this week that police are still seeking tips in Taylor’s October 2021 murder.

Since Bilal’s first term as sheriff, which began in 2020, the city has paid out more than $1 million to settle three whistle-blower lawsuits filed by former Sheriff’s Office staffers who said they were retaliated against for raising concerns about unauthorized spending, alleged theft, sexual harassment and attempts to hire employees without performing background checks.

Millions of dollars in tax revenue has gone uncollected in recent years because the Sheriff’s Office has not held auctions for chronically tax-delinquent properties since April 2021. Bilal has blamed the city’s Law Department.

In 2022, records show, the Sheriff’s Office floated a proposal to boost pay for senior staffers, including increasing Bilal’s $136,083 salary by 109% to $285,000.

Bilal, whose salary is set by the city charter, later told The Inquirer that her staff had attempted to double her salary without her knowledge.

She was easily reelected to a second term in November.