W. Philly man sentenced to 50 to 100 years for choking 2 women
Andre Taylor had lists and lists of females he wanted to choke or claimed to have choked. Their names were found in 28 pages of handwritten notes discovered in his state prison cell 12 years ago, when Taylor was behind bars for choking three teenage girls in West Philadelphia.
Andre Taylor had lists and lists of females he wanted to choke or claimed to have choked.
Their names were found in 28 pages of handwritten notes discovered in his state prison cell 12 years ago, when Taylor was behind bars for choking three teenage girls in West Philadelphia.
After Taylor was released to a halfway house in East Falls in 2014, he twice returned to his old neighborhood in West Philadelphia while out on a pass, sneaked up behind women, and choked them with a white rope while trying to rob them.
Taylor pleaded guilty in December to aggravated assault, robbery, unlawful restraint, and possession of an instrument of crime in the two cases.
On Friday, Common Pleas Court Judge J. Scott O'Keefe sentenced Taylor, 35, to the maximum sentence allowable on the 2014 cases: a total of 50 to 100 years in state prison.
In the earlier case, on July 27, 2014, Taylor ran up behind a 27-year-old woman walking on Larchwood Avenue near 46th Street and choked her with a white rope and the woman's iPhone earbud cord. He robbed her of $7.
Three days later, about 12:40 p.m. July 30, he came up behind a 29-year-old woman and choked her with the same rope in an attempt to steal her necklace. The woman fought back. Nearby police arrested him.
Before the two assaults on women he didn't know, Taylor had assaulted three girls he knew in West Philly - then ages 13, 14, and 16 - in 2001 and 2002, Assistant District Attorney Cydney Pope said.
He was serving a total sentence of seven to 14 years in prison on those aggravated-assault cases and for an unrelated past robbery when, in 2004, a staffer at the State Correctional Institution-Albion in Erie County found a 28-page document in Taylor's cell, Pope said.
The pages, in Taylor's handwriting, included notes to himself, Pope said. "Do This When Home!!," he wrote, and "Make Sure The Girl Is Not Breathing And Is Dead!"
He also wrote of his plans: "Watch her choke on something until death, or Just Dead" and "Strangle her with a Night Stick, until dead."
Pope said authorities were not aware of Taylor killing anyone, and it did not appear that he sexually assaulted anyone.
There were "hundreds of names," some with both first and last names, on those 28 pages, with some overlap, Pope said.
On one list, Taylor wrote 58 names of girls he claimed to have choked.
On another list, he had 12 girls whom he wrote he should have killed.
Taylor also wrote that he planned to go to a middle school to get "another" graduation book.
Pope said she asked O'Keefe for the maximum sentence for Taylor. "We know exactly what he would do if he were to be released," she said. "The community here, the people in Philadelphia, need to be protected."
215-854-2592 @julieshawphilly