Tishawn Folkes-Taylor thought she was safe after living through abuse by her ex-husband, but she was sadly wrong, her heartbroken friends recalled at a memorial Sunday.
Folkes-Taylor was found slain in her upstate apartment last week and police say her ex, Timothy Taylor, committed the crime while on the run from a killing two weeks earlier of his pregnant cop girlfriend in Brooklyn.
Ten mourners who went to Msgr. Scanlan High School with Folkes-Taylor got together Sunday at their high school alma mater in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.
They shared memories and condolences and let loose white balloons in memory of the 44-year-old mother of three kids.
“Tishawn was a great woman, a great mother, a great friend,” said her classmate and friend Ed Nelson.
The last time they chatted, just about a week before she died, she was feeling confident, he said.
“This is her exact words — ‘Nobody can’t mess with me because of what I dealt with with my ex-husband,’” Nelson said.
“She was saying, nobody can hurt her. Nothing can hurt her because of what she went through,” he added. “She was telling me, ‘Ed, I’m strong.’ This was our last conversation.”
Folkes-Taylor died of trauma in her apartment in Schenectady, police said, in what was deemed a homicide.
The suspect had disappeared after his girlfriend Theresa Gregg, a city Department of Homeless Services police officer, was found dead by her twin daughters on May 13 in the Williamsburg apartment she shared with him.
He was nabbed in Philadelphia last week by the U.S. Marshals Service after his phone was tracked there, a police source said.
Folkes-Taylor had an order of protection against her ex that made her feel safe, said her friend and former classmate Tina, who didn’t want to disclose her last name.
The victim said her ex was living in New York with a new wife, “so she felt pretty safe,” said the friend, who spoke to her the day before the murder.
“She wasn’t scared of him anymore,” she said at the memorial.
Nevertheless, she said, Folkes-Taylor talked a lot about her abusive ex and seemed to be suffering from depression and anxiety related to all the violence in her past.
“He shaved her hair off. He burnt her with an iron. This is what she told me. He also choked her,” she said. “She was suffering.”
The couple met when she was a caseworker and he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to the friend. He was the father of two of her children and they divorced last year, she said.
She said Taylor must have broken into the Schenectady apartment because the victim would not have welcomed or harbored him.
Folkes-Taylor had heard that Taylor’s girlfriend in Brooklyn had been killed, she added.
Born in the Bronx, Folkes-Taylor graduated in 1997 and later moved to Schenectady, her classmates recounted.
“She was extremely smart. She tutored me and a couple of people in math and a couple of other subjects,” said former classmate Christopher Greene.
He said they talked recently about what she was going through, but she didn’t share many details.
“I wouldn’t even think of this happening to her,” he said in tears.
“When I found out, it was sadness, but it was more rage than anything when I found out how she passed,” he added. “She damn sure didn’t deserve it.”