A young man who could be sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing an Atlanta restaurant owner spoke to jurors this morning, expressing both nervousness and confidence as he tried to convince them not to take his life.

“I’m kinda nervous and a little bit afraid,” Rejon Taylor said, the first time he had spoken since his federal death penalty trial began Aug. 25.

The jury convicted him in mid-September of first-degree murder, carjacking and kidnapping, and the prosecution and defense are back in court this week for a separate proceeding in which jurors will determine Mr. Taylor’s sentence. He continues to maintain his innocence.

True to previous testimony from family members about how quiet and shy the 24-year-old is, Mr. Taylor stumbled on his words at several junctures during his talk to the jury.

He said he had grown up in a single-parent home and that his father “was locked up the first 10 years of my life.”

When his father eventually got out of prison, Mr. Taylor said he “didn’t feel comfortable” having a father figure in his life, that he had become a “mother’s boy.”

But Mr. Taylor would soon come to admire aspects of his father who, according to Mr. Taylor and family members, had previously been convicted of bank fraud and is currently in prison again.

“I heard him trying to wire million of dollars over the phone,” Mr. Taylor said, later admitting that working hard to make an honest living took a backseat when he heard rumors of how his father could get “$30,000, $40,000 easily out of the bank.”

“At this time my dad was into ID theft and bank fraud,” Mr. Taylor said. “I secretly wanted to be like him in my heart.”

Identity theft was the beginning of Mr. Taylor’s troubles when, at 17, he and two friends began a mailbox-robbing ruse in the wealthy Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead. They soon would focus on Guy Luck, a wealthy restaurant owner and French national who was in the process of building a second home and had a habit of never checking his mailbox.

Authorities say Mr. Taylor’s ID theft routine eventually evolved into kidnapping and murder when, in August 2003, he and his friend kidnapped Mr. Luck from his driveway, drove him into Tennessee and shot him in the mouth on a side of a road in Collegedale.

See tomorrow’s Times Free Press for complete details.

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