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  Sex Offender Got Shelter Job without Background Check

By Stefano Esposito
Chicago Sun-Times [Chicago IL]
December 13, 2004

There was no reason not to trust Michael Taylor, the woman once thought.

He said he was a church minister.

He promised to help find a home for her and her two sons.

He told her that if she stayed strong, God would find a way.

Taylor was the woman's case manager at a city-funded homeless shelter for women and children on the West Side. She first met him last summer.

But only now, after Taylor was arrested last month and accused of sexually assaulting her 13-year-old son, does the woman know the truth: Taylor, 48, is a convicted sex offender.

The woman, who did not want her name used, can't fathom why Taylor was counseling some of the city's most vulnerable people.

"I'm very angry," she said.

How Taylor got hired at the shelter isn't entirely clear, but the fact that he landed a job there highlights that the city doesn't require that shelter or 27 others that get city money to screen job applicants for sex offenses.

Information easily found

Last week, it took a Chicago Sun-Times reporter about three minutes to find Taylor's name and photograph on the Chicago Police Department's sex-offender Web site.

The Sun-Times is not naming the shelter to protect the privacy of its residents.

Its director said she didn't hire Taylor, but that she later fired him because she was "uncomfortable" with him. She declined to elaborate, hung up and refused to return phone calls.

The director of Innervoice Inc., which oversees 28 shelters in Chicago -- including the West Side one where Taylor worked -- also declined to comment.

Lisa Elkuss, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Human Services, which funds Innervoice, said the department is working on changing the sex-offender screening policy. She described the sex-assault allegations against Taylor as "horrendous."

"We agree with you completely, and we are doing something about it," Elkuss said.

But why aren't shelters already required to screen for sex offenses?

"These are not high-tech, sophisticated organizations . . . and some don't have computers," Elkuss said.

By most accounts, Taylor is gregarious, dresses in crisp business attire and introduces himself as "Rev. Taylor."

He had that title in 1998, when, as chairman of a school council at Lindblom Technical High School, he was charged with molesting one of the school's students away from the campus.

Taylor later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge. He was sentenced to probation and was required to register as a sex offender, said Marcy Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

Then, as now, Taylor was affiliated with the New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side.

As soon as the first set of allegations surfaced, Taylor was barred from any programs connected with kids, said the church's pastor, the Rev. Stephen Thurston.

Thurston said he didn't know Taylor had been working with families at the West Side shelter. Until his arrest this fall, Taylor was a volunteer minister for the church's jail outreach program, Thurston said.

"If we don't allow individuals who have made mistakes and who have fallen by the wayside to be part of the church, there would be nothing to give them any kind of help," Thurston said.

Son lived with suspect

The homeless mother also has faith in mankind.

That's why, she said, she eventually let her son move out of the West Side shelter last fall and go live with Taylor in his South Side home.

"My son was having a very hard time in the shelter," she said.

Taylor bought the boy clothes, a CD player, and the two went bowling, she said.

The woman said she is familiar with the term "grooming" -- the overt displays of generosity sex offenders use to lure their victims. But Taylor's seemed a genuine kindness.

"I was impressed with someone wanting to show interest in my son," the woman said. "And the fact is, he was a reverend."

 
 

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