Judge Kim Taylor
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Judge Kim Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I was elected district court judge in Alexander, Davia, Davidson counties in 1986. At that time, I had one child who did not have autism. In 1987, my second child was born. His name is Garrett and he was born in April of 87. We hadn't heard much about what autism was at that point. So we're just trying to find resources and try to figure out what help he needed and how he was
going to be as he grew older. We did the hearing test, neurological test and such, and eventually an organization called TEACH, it's T-E-A-C-C-H, which is part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did testing and told us that he had autism. And of course, this is around age three. So at that point, we tried to get some school resources in place.
There weren't any resources in Alexander County, North Carolina at the time. But I have a sister-in-law who was director of exceptional children's programs, and she was able to get some things in place. Now, of course, we have a lot more people on the spectrum, and they have classrooms for people with autism. As he grew older, he became eventually self-injurious.
Around the age of 11, he started hitting himself, hurting himself a lot. I would be called from the bench, and you got to come get him from school. He'd hit himself, and, you know, it was just pretty terrible. I continued on the bench. I can't recall if I was in Superior District. I think I was a Superior Court judge at the time.
My husband was working as a deputy sheriff in Iredell County and told me after his work shift that he believed someone with autism had died in police custody.
We were very concerned, upset about it, and we got the details of what happened. His name was Sidney Templeton. He was in his early 20s and had a caregiver in Statesville, North Carolina. And apparently he had a meltdown with the caregiver because They thought because his medication had been changed or something had happened in his environment that caused him to have a meltdown. She called 911.
Officers went out, didn't understand. She told them, we believe at the scene, she told them that he was autistic and couldn't speak, but they didn't know what autism was. They thought, in fact, somebody told us that they thought she said autistic.
We thought then, well, we've got to do something to educate our responders, law enforcement, people that might run into our kids and not know what's going on with them. So we were able to get a task force together involving law enforcement. We had people from the Autism Society. We had district attorneys. We had a broad range of people, really.
that were willing to work with us, and we were able to get a joint task force with the North Carolina legislature, who we met periodically, you know, and had presentations from various interested parties, and were able to develop some plans and some changes that we could make.
We were able to get basic law enforcement training to make it mandatory that people going into law enforcement would get training about autism. And it's my understanding that they still have to have annual training classes I'm not sure that they're as good as we would like them to be, but they do have some training at least to recognize what the word is and how somebody might act.
We were able to do a video. It's called Autism in the Criminal Justice System, available through Dennis DeBalt, which his company is Legacy Productions. And the video is available through him. Although the state of North Carolina paid the production video, but he sells the DVD.
uh yeah and it's about an autistic we had a real autistic person who was charged with some sort of online pornography or distributing pornography which is kind of a typical offense as autistic males generally get older and they think that something that's on tv or comes on the internet is okay to watch and so they don't really understand that it's illegal to be to be watching that stuff or sending it or anything
So we did the video and basically went through some explanation how someone on spectrum might act and that they have difficulty with eye contact, some difficulty with understanding instructions and can even get, you know, defensive or aggressive at times, you know, when they feel they're under threat.
We've continued to try to educate law enforcement and still have some pretty bad incidents happening. Hopefully we've made some difference. But one of the things that we did, and we expanded this group to the Autism Society of America, and it became a committee called Safe and Sound through the Autism Society of America.
And we had representatives from all over the country working with us on Safe and Sound. going around doing trainings and developing training materials and such. And a lot of those people are still out there. My understanding is still out there working.
Yeah. A lot of these folks are first responders, law enforcement, who have kids on the spectrum and who... kind of made it their life's purpose, you know, to try to help.
Yeah, it is great. But I wish we had more resources, and I wish we had a more national legislation, if that makes sense, because it's spotty. It's here and there, and Virginia is trying to do stuff, and, you know, everybody's trying to do their own thing, and I wish we had something more uniform.
Yeah, good.
Right, right. The thing about it is, say there's a bad incident and somebody with autism is hurt or killed in a law enforcement custody or, you know, with any first responder. It hurts the family of that person, the law enforcement officer or whoever the individual is that, you know, is involved with the scenario is usually damaged by it.
So we're not trying to punish anybody. We're just trying to educate you so that you don't run into a situation, don't know what to do.
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