Former boxing icon Meldrick Taylor charged with aggravated assault

Meldrick Taylor, the Philadelphia native and boxing prodigy who won two boxing championships and an Olympic gold medal, has been charged with aggravated assault, possession of an instrument of crime, and terroristic threats in an incident Monday night that seemed to be a landlord-tenant dispute in his North Philadelphia rowhouse.

Some neighbors on Tuesday did not seem aware that the former boxer in the two-story redbrick rowhouse between another house and a vacant lot on the 2700 block of West Lehigh Avenue was once a hero in Philadelphia’s storied boxing scene.

Hours earlier, around 11 p.m. Monday, Taylor tried to evict a 26-year-old man who lived in Taylor’s home, demanding that he vacate by the following morning. When the tenant protested, police said, Taylor threatened him with a revolver. Someone called 911, and the former two-time world champ was arrested after a 90-minute standoff. He was released Tuesday on an unsecured bond.

“He would talk to us through the door and he refused to come out,” Chief Inspector Scott Small said in an interview. The standoff lasted 90 minutes, until police eventually persuaded Taylor to surrender to SWAT officers. When he opened his door, Small said, there did not seem to be anyone else in the apartment. Police said no shots were fired.

A status hearing is scheduled for July 8 at 10 a.m. and his listed attorney is the public defender’s office. A call to the public defender’s office was not returned Tuesday night.

Property records show Taylor owns the house near the city’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood where the standoff happened. It is across the street from the Mount Sinai Tabernacle Baptist Church and near a barbershop and library. The first-floor windows of his home are blocked by red curtains, only displaying a handwritten sign advertising a two-bedroom apartment for rent.

No one answered the door when a reporter knocked Tuesday afternoon. People were moving items including three mattresses and a dresser out of the apartment building into the trunk of a green Ford. They declined to identify themselves to a reporter.

Taylor was a few months shy of 18 when he won the Olympic featherweight title at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Four years later, he beat Buddy McGirt for the IBF junior welterweight title. Then he faced off Julio Cesar Chavez at the Las Vegas Hilton on March 17, 1990, in what ended up being one of the most debated results in boxing history.

Taylor was up by the count of six when Chavez floored him with just 17 seconds left. Referee Richard Steele started the mandatory eight-count and said that because Taylor did not respond fast enough he didn’t think Taylor could continue and called the fight for Chavez.

Taylor was hospitalized for four days after the fight, ESPN reported in 2015, and he was diagnosed with a facial fracture, dehydration, and blood in his urine. “All Taylor had to do was stand for two seconds and he would have won the fight,” ESPN wrote.

After the loss, Sports Illustrated reported, “his life was never the same.”

Taylor has faced legal issues before, including pleading guilty to insurance fraud, indecent assault, and unlawful restraint.

Taylor had large aspirations, his former trainer George Benton told the Miami Herald in 1990.

“He wants to be one of the greatest fighters who ever lived,” Benton said at the time. “He wants to be recognized as the best in the business today, pound for pound, just like Sugar Ray Robinson was years ago.”

In a 1990 interview with the Miami Herald, a year before he won the WBA welterweight title, he talked about being a champ.

“I remember being 10 years old and writing ‘I will become champion of the world’ on my dresser drawer with a black magic marker,” Taylor told the Herald. “I always believed it would happen.”