 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
Saturday, March 04, 2000
By Dennis Roddy
A criminal arraignment takes about 15 minutes, but getting there and back, the paperwork, the waiting around, can stretch immeasurably.
Thus did Ronald Taylor spend Friday. An accused killer of three, he was consigned -- like one of the souls from Dante who failed to choose between God and the devil -- to travel from point to point along the outermost circle of hell.
Wednesday night, he was on the third floor of the coroner's office for two counts of homicide. Thursday, it was a trip back to a district justice's office in Wilkinsburg, across the street from his mother's high-rise, to collect the hate and assault charges. Before they finished, another of his victims died. So Friday, it was back to the coroner's office for a fresh homicide charge.
He clanked in, the bright silver leg shackles setting off the bright, red prison jumpsuit.
"You imagine how many others like him there are, running around town," said a smartly dressed man in a lab coat as he leaned over to me. "There have to be more."
The night of his arrest, Taylor mugged for the news cameras. Yesterday, he looked like a man who has just gotten over some great surprise. Deputy Coroner Timothy Uhrich asked questions and Taylor's head seemed to move woozily at the slightest sign of complexity.
Taylor filled out a personal information card. He brushed his goatee. Asked for his name, he gave it correctly. Asked for his address, he included the ZIP code, as if he were likely to receive mail at that address again.
Did he understand his rights?
"I'm not sure," he said.
Would he like to talk it over with his attorney?
"Sure." Taylor and Sharon Ecker Terra conferred briefly.
So, Uhrich resumed, does he understand the charges?
"Enough to proceed," Terra replied.
Proceed they did. Taylor's next trip out of jail will be to a preliminary hearing, unless one of the two surviving shooting victims dies.
It is too early to know to what extent Ronald Taylor is mentally impaired and to what degree he is simply a mean dog looking for someone to bite, and how much one quality might inform the other.
What is quite clear is that if not liking a particular race or creed, distrusting all manner of official institutions and holding little regard for civic values has become a pathology, there probably are a lot of Ronald Taylors out there. We simply don't know how many of them intend to act on their impulsive hatreds.
At Taylor's apartment building in Wilkinsburg, a team of men sawed, scraped, wiped and pounded the damage and smell from the fifth-floor hallway. After killing maintenance man John Kroll, and before walking out on the street to shoot strangers, Taylor had set fire to his apartment.
Downstairs, a man named Ken Wood dropped off a stack of leaflets for Allegheny East, the mental health clinic three blocks away. Taylor was treated there after leaving the psychiatric ward at a Pittsburgh hospital last year.
"We have some walk-in counseling available," Wood explained.
The building's residents, like others in Wilkinsburg, might be feeling a bit disoriented just now. Wood delivered identical leaflets at the Burger King, where Joe Healy was killed, and the McDonald's, where still three more were shot in the head.
Wood didn't say it. He didn't have to. Ronald Taylor had left behind some victims who bleed only inside.
Somehow they must be persuaded to walk in.