Norfolk man will serve 10 years for killing during a botched robbery
NORFOLK — Kydon Taylor bet the rest of his life and it paid off big, winning him more than a decade of freedom and sparing him a murder conviction.
Taylor, 20, was convicted in a plea deal Wednesday of involuntary manslaughter, attempted robbery and illegally using a gun for killing Lawrence “Moochie” Williams on April 23, 2018, in a botched robbery. He agreed to a sentence that will send him to prison for 10 years.
But that punishment is less severe than the 22 years he agreed to serve in April 2019 when he first pleaded guilty in the case and was convicted of second-degree murder and other felonies.
Later that year, Taylor got a new lawyer, Tom Reed. He pushed to withdraw Taylor’s guilty plea, arguing his client was not properly advised by his lawyer or Circuit Judge Mary Jane Hall about how damning his actions were in the murder case against him.
Hall granted Reed’s motion. Walking back a guilty plea after conviction but before sentencing is rare, but not unheard of.
There was a risk. By reneging on his plea, Taylor brought back into play a first-degree murder charge, which prosecutors agreed to abandon as part of the first agreement. If prosecutors had won a conviction on that charge alone at trial, he’d have faced a life sentence.
Around 9:40 p.m. on April 23, Taylor and several other men conspired to rob Williams, a barber and “the neighborhood weed man,” of a small amount of marijuana, according to court documents. Taylor met
Charles Poff, now 25, on the sidewalk in the 800 block of 35th St., and then they held up Williams at gunpoint. When Williams, 38, stepped back and started to reach in his waistband or pocket, shots were fired.
Taylor and Poff denied shooting Williams, pointing the finger at each other.
Regardless, Williams was hit in his left arm, left thigh and pelvis. One witness, who knew the defendants and heard them planning the robbery, said she watched Williams limp across the street after getting shot and start banging on her door.
“We went out to help him,” she told police.
It wasn’t enough. Paramedics took Williams to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he died two days later.
During Taylor’s first plea hearing, prosecutors admitted they couldn’t prove he was the shooter or even if he had a gun when Williams was killed. One said she believed Taylor routinely carried a revolver, but detectives found only six 9 mm casings at the scene.
In 2019, Poff was sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and three other felonies. Poff admitted to conspiring with Taylor to rob Williams of marijuana, but said Taylor was the one who shot him.
Police arrested two others after the shooting: Trevon Myricks and Jessie Kirby Jr. Two months later, prosecutors dropped all charges against them.