A 68 year old man is killed by an intruder when he returns home with a friend
Paul Taylor, a 68-year-old man, was killed on April 14, 2013, after what investigators said appeared to be a burglary turned deadly at his home on the 1500 block of Columbia Drive in unincorporated Decatur. Police said Taylor had returned to the property with a friend at about 11:45 that Sunday morning. Instead of coming back to an ordinary day, he seemed to have walked straight into violence. Authorities said he was shot after apparently interrupting a break-in at the house, a place where he was known to refurbish and sell cars.
In the first accounts that emerged, the scene carried the feeling of a routine moment suddenly broken apart. Taylor had come home, and within moments there was gunfire. He was rushed from Columbia Drive to a local hospital, but he did not survive. The killing left behind the outline of a terrible encounter: a man back at his own home in broad daylight, a friend with him, and an intruder or intruders believed to have been inside when he arrived.
The public details that followed were sparse and grim. DeKalb County police said the shooting appeared connected to a burglary, and that explanation gave the case a stark, cruel shape. Taylor was not described in the reporting as looking for trouble; instead, the picture was of a man returning to his property and crossing paths with someone who should not have been there. The fact that the shooting happened late in the morning, not deep in the night, made it feel even more brazen.
As for the investigation’s outcome, the online reporting that is publicly available and accessible does not appear to identify any named suspect, arrest, charge, trial, or conviction in Taylor’s death. In the sources that could be located, police described the circumstances of the killing but did not publicly announce who pulled the trigger or whether anyone was ever taken into custody. That leaves the case, at least in the reporting trail that remains online, as the story of a man who came home on an April morning and never walked back out alive.
