Struck by bullet, thoughts were of her sons, officers
“They started running up the block and I was running behind them and I felt the bullet,” she said Sunday.
Taylor, 38, had been shot from behind, in her right calf. Still standing, she looked to a police officer ahead of her.
Then he was shot too.
“I saw him go down. When he got hit, he slumped over and he said, ‘He has a gun, run!'?” she said, recounting the incident at Baylor Medical Center. She began to sob, covering her face.
It would take hours for Taylor to learn the fate of her sons — ages 12, 14, 15 and 18 — and of the dozen officers shot, five of them fatally, by 25-year-old gunman Micah Johnson.
Taylor is not an activist. She and her family live in Garland, a Dallas suburb, and don't know their way around downtown Dallas.
She tried to raise her sons right, instructing them to treat police with respect but also to call home if they were ever stopped. Taylor admired police but was increasingly disturbed by the growing tally of police shootings involving black men and feared for her boys. It had been her idea to go to the protest, the family's first.
After she was shot, Taylor managed to grab her 15-year-old son, Andrew Humphrey, and pushed him between a car and the curb, shielding him with her body.
“I was just laying on top of him,” she said. “If it was going to happen to one of my sons, it was going to happen to me first.”
She watched police stream up the block toward them — and the shooting. One of them shouted, “Is anybody hit?”
Andrew yelled no, unaware his mother was injured.
Taylor didn't want to alarm him and called out quietly to one of the officers, “Yes, sir, I'm hit in my leg.”
Police rushed over, most of them white officers, and jumped on top of Taylor and her son. “There was another one at our feet and another one over our head and several of them lying against a wall. And they just stayed there with us,” she said. “I had never seen anything like that before, the way they came around us and guarded us.”
Andrew was crying for police to move them, but they said it wasn't safe.
As they lay on the concrete, pinned down by gunfire, Taylor saw another police officer get shot. She still doesn't know if the two officers who were shot in front of her lived through the night.
“It was hundreds of rounds,” she said, “shots all around us.”
Soon after, police decided it was time to escape to a nearby patrol car, which Taylor could see was already “riddled with bullets.”
By the time they reached Baylor Medical Center, she said, the tires were flat and they were driving “on rims only.” Outside the emergency room, Taylor could see a police officer on a gurney.
“I just kept praying for everyone: for my sons to be safe, for the officers,” she said.
The bullet had fractured a bone in Taylor's leg, but a surgeon had repaired it with a metal plate and screws and said she would be able to walk in a few months.
But Taylor's biggest concern was the safety of her sons.
She was relieved when Andrew finally told her: “They found all three, and they are all OK.”
Just then, she looked up to see a police officer delivering bad news to a colleague.
“I'm celebrating my kids being alive and I'm listening to them say how an officer didn't make it,” Taylor said, cringing as she sat at the hospital Sunday surrounded by her sons and other family.
“It hurt,” she said. “Of course I'm thankful that my babies are OK. But somebody's dad, somebody's husband isn't.”
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