Zombicon shooting victim remembered by friends, family
Zombicon started for 20-year-old Expavious Taylor as a fun night out with his girlfriend. It ended with him lying dead on First Street in Fort Myers wearing a creepy clown mask.
Taylor, who went by his middle name of Tyrell, was one of the six shot at Zombicon on Saturday night. Four were taken to Lee Memorial Health Center with non-life-threatening injuries and one person was treated at the scene and released. An estimated 20,000 people crowded the downtown streets when the shooting happened at 11:45 p.m.
"We just were standing there and then we heard the shots, and then we all got down," said Jasmine Gaure, Taylor's 26-year-old girlfriend. "When we all picked our heads up to check on each other, we saw him lying there on the sidewalk."
Gaure said they hadn't been at the event 45 minutes before Taylor was shot.
"There was no confrontations before that. It was unexpected, it was so fast," she said. "We were in the wrong place because we didn't have problems with anybody there."
She said that they and a couple they were with had just left watching a DJ by Starbucks and were trying to grab a drink across from Capone's.
"We were just standing there waiting to drink. That's when," she said. "Everybody ducked and ran."
Guare said they had their backs to the street, so no one saw any of the shooters. All they saw was Taylor lying on the street.
"He wasn't moving at all," she said.
Gaure said the couple wasn't sure if they were going to go to the event: "We kind of went back and forth on it."
But they decided to make the most of his weekend, as he rarely had one off.
It was a bye week for Taylor, who was an offensive lineman for ASA College, a junior college in Miami.
He played football at Clewiston High School his senior year as an offensive and defensive lineman. He graduated in May and headed to Miami.
Gaure said Taylor was interested in forensic science but mostly becoming a mortician. He worked at a funeral home preparing bodies for burial to get job experience.
"He was heading in the right direction, he was going to be somebody," she said.
Taylor's sister, Amanda Andrews, remembers Gaure calling her hysterical just after the shooting.
"Tyrell got shot!" Andrews recalls her yelling. "He won't move, he won't move."
Andrews, 25 of LaBelle, couldn't believe it.
"Why would somebody do this?" Andrews asked. "Everybody loved him."
Andrews, who was on her way back to Florida after a family funeral in Georgia, remembers the last time she spoke to her brother was Friday to arrange for his visit to Clewiston to see family Sunday. She recalled telling him: "Hopefully you'll still be there when we get back home."
She described her brother as a church-going young man who sang gospel and was a two-sport athlete who also played basketball for Clewiston.
Andrews said the trials he's been through in his life underscore his accomplishments.
Taylor had lost his mother, father, grandmother and a child who died at birth.
"For him to have lost so many people, he stayed focused and didn't give up," she said. "He pushed and pushed and pushed. He showed us he was going to make something out of himself."
Pete Walker, Taylor's football coach at Clewiston, said he was impressed by Taylor's determination in spite of all he'd been through.
"It's a tragic story of a young person losing his life over not a whole lot," he said.
Walker said Taylor was a great player — "He got his best football ahead of him." — and got along with everyone on the team.
"He could have gone the wrong direction with all the things of his life and tried to make something positive of his life," he said. "(He was) trying to make something of himself. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible thing to swallow."
His current coach echoed just that.
"All the things he's been through, it's amazing the way he carries himself on a day to day basis through life," said Ernest Jones, head football coach for ASA College. "He's got a hundred brothers over here who are hurting right now."
When asked about Taylor, Jones said he "plays hard, goes hard," and that "his smile will change your whole life."
He also makes changes on the field.
Taylor was a walk-on to the team. Out of 200 who tried out in Aug. 1, he was one of the six who made the cut.
During tryouts, players ran 16 100-meter dashes. The 6-foot-4, 240-pound Taylor finished first every time.
"He stood out," Jones said. "He wanted to keep running."
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