'You don't get over it': Wilkinsburg killer Ronald Taylor dies in prison

A Wilkinsburg man sentenced to death for a racially motivated rampage in 2000 that killed three people died this week in prison.

Ronald Taylor, 63, was being held on death row at the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County.

He died on Tuesday from natural causes, according to a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Taylor was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault after shooting five people on March 1, 2000.

Killed were John Kroll, 55, who was a maintenance man at Taylor’s apartment building; Joseph Healy, 71, a retired priest; and Emil Sanielevici, 20, a third-year physics student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kroll’s widow, Carol Kroll, said she was notified by the Department of Corrections the day Taylor died.

“We were ecstatic,” she said. “We were happy and relieved that that’s one thing we don’t have hanging over us anymore.

“He shouldn’t have lived that long.”

In the 24 years since her husband was killed, Kroll said both their son and daughter got married without their dad there with them.

“We have five grandchildren that John never got to meet,” she said. “That’s been very hard because he would have loved every minute.”

Kroll said that their 11-year-old grandson recently started asking questions about what happened.

“We’ve been talking a lot about John with him,” she said.

Taylor’s death doesn’t change anything, Kroll said.

“It doesn’t take away these 24 years of being without him. There’s no way to even describe what it’s been like.”

Police said Taylor, who was Black, targeted his victims because they were white.

On the day of the slayings, Kroll and two other workers went to his apartment to replace his door.

He called one of them “dirty white trash,” and “a racist white pig.”

A short time later, around 11:15 a.m., he retrieved a .22-caliber revolver he took from his mother in his apartment and loaded it.

He then set a couch in his apartment on fire and left in search of the workers.

Taylor shot Kroll once in the chest and then walked to a nearby Burger King. Inside, he found Healy sitting at a booth and shot him in the head.

Taylor then walked a short distance to McDonald’s where he shot two more people in the head. They both survived, but were severely injured.

Taylor left McDonald’s, walked to the drive-thru line and shot Sanielevici.

Following a two-hour standoff with police, Taylor was eventually arrested at an office building.

Initially, he was found incompetent to stand trial. However, three months later, he was found competent and went to trial in November 2001.

Taylor’s attorneys offered an insanity defense. They argued that Taylor had paranoid schizophrenia — he had been hospitalized twice in 1990 and 1998 — and could not be held liable for his actions.

The jury disagreed and sentenced Taylor, who had no previous criminal record, to death.

He had remained on death row since then.

Kroll thinks Taylor should have been executed long ago, and she’s critical of the criminal and political systems that stopped it from happening.

Taylor’s prosecutor weighs in

Now-Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski, who was the prosecutor on Taylor’s case, sympathizes.

“Taylor’s case epitomizes the legal inertia and tension that plagues this circumstance,” Borkowski said.

The tension, he continued, is that state law still calls for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in certain situations — like multiple deaths — but the executive branch has issued a moratorium.

“The judicial branch is in the middle of it,” Borkowski said. “It’s really not fair to the surviving family members and the 12 citizens called to make this decision.”

No one has been executed in Pennsylvania since 1999, and former Gov. Tom Wolf issued a moratorium on capital punishment in 2015. Current Gov. Josh Shapiro has called on the legislature to abolish the death penalty.

There are 96 people on Pennsylvania’s death row, and four are from Allegheny County.

“You don’t get over it. You don’t ever stop grieving,” Kroll said. “You just somehow learn to live each day.

“You have to go on, and that’s what we do.”