Blaise Taylor, a former NFL scout and college football defensive back, was found guilty on Wednesday in a Nashville, Tennessee courtroom of murdering his girlfriend and her unborn child after evidence showed he had poisoned her drink with cocaine in February 2023.
The jury recommended a life sentence for Taylor, who was 30 at the time of the verdict. He is scheduled to be formally sentenced on September 9. Taylor was found guilty on four counts, including one count each of second-degree murder and first-degree murder for the death of his girlfriend, as well as two additional murder counts related to the death of her unborn child.
What prosecutors established at trial
The events that led to Taylor’s conviction began on February 25, 2023, when Taylor called emergency services claiming his girlfriend was experiencing an allergic reaction. She was transported to the hospital in critical condition and remained unable to speak with investigators before her death on March 6, 2023, her 25th birthday.
Her unborn child, a five-month-old fetus that Taylor is believed to have fathered, died on February 27, 2023, nine days before the mother. Prosecutors argued that Taylor had deliberately placed cocaine in her pink lemonade, establishing the act as intentional poisoning rather than an accident or overdose unrelated to his conduct.
Taylor was arrested in 2024, more than a year after the deaths, following an investigation that traced the source of the cocaine to the drink he had given her.
A career in football cut short by arrest
Taylor had built a professional career in football that extended beyond his playing days at Arkansas State, where he was a four-year starter from 2014 through 2017 and earned first-team All-Sun Belt recognition as a defensive back and punt returner while serving as a team captain.
After his collegiate career he transitioned into the professional side of the sport, spending four years working in the Tennessee Titans’ scouting department. At the time of his arrest he had moved into a defensive analyst role with a major university football program.
The trajectory of a career that took him from a successful collegiate player to an NFL front office position and then into a college coaching role made his arrest a significant story within the football community, representing a sharp departure from the professional path he had been building.
The legal process and what follows
The jury’s guilty verdicts on all four counts reflect the prosecution’s success in establishing both the intent behind the poisoning and the direct causal connection between Taylor’s actions and the deaths of both his girlfriend and her unborn child. The inclusion of first-degree murder counts for the fetus reflects Tennessee law on the legal status of unborn children as victims in homicide cases.
Formal sentencing is scheduled for September 9, at which point a judge will impose the sentence consistent with the jury’s recommendation of life in prison. Taylor’s attorneys had contested the state’s account of events throughout the trial, but the jury’s verdict indicates they found the prosecution’s case persuasive on all charges.
The young woman whose death prompted the investigation was 25 years old on the day she died, having never recovered from the condition that brought her to the hospital nine days earlier. The circumstances of her death, and the timing of it falling on her birthday, added a dimension of particular tragedy to a case that had drawn significant attention in the Nashville legal community since the charges were filed.
