IBF Middleweight champion Jermain Taylor injured his ribs and was arrested again on Monday thus postponing his February 6 title defense with Sergio Mora, according to Dan Rafael of espn.com
A woman said Tuesday that Jermain Taylor threatened to fatally shoot her 5-, 3-, and 1-year-old children, and that she knocked the gun away after the cursing middleweight boxing champion put the weapon to her husband’s head in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Monday.
Toya Smith, 40, told The Associated Press that she and her family were having a good time at the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade Monday when Taylor produced his boxing belt and asked to get a photo with her son. Smith says her family had never met Taylor before and that it appeared he had been drinking.
“He bent down to give my son the belt and he almost fell over and dropped the belt, and he thought my baby dropped the belt,” Smith told The Associated Press.
“He put [the gun] up against his temple, I jumped in front of it and it went off up into the air,” injuring her husband’s ear, Smith told the AP. “He was going to shoot him, but I saw it, he was going to kill him and I had to hit the gun.”
A Little Rock police report says Taylor was arrested without incident and a gun was recovered. He is charged with five felony counts of aggravated assault, three felony counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and a misdemeanor count of drug possession after he was found to have a small bag of marijuana.
Taylor was released Tuesday from the Pulaski County jail on $50,000 bond. His attorneys did not return phone calls to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
In addition, Taylor’s title defense against Sergio Mora, which was scheduled to headline the Feb. 6 edition of ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” at the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, is off and unlikely to be rescheduled. His promoter, Lou DiBella, said Taylor suffered a broken rib in a sparring session a few days ago. DiBella said they had hoped to keep the fight together but that X-rays showed a fracture.
“We learned a few days ago that Jermain suffered a rib injury in sparring, and we were getting another opinion and seeing how Jermain felt, and then this incident happened,” DiBella told ESPN.com’s Dan Rafael on Monday. “His fight on Feb. 6 was going to be canceled due to a legitimate injury, a rib fracture, but this obviously is a shocking development no matter what the exact details are, and it leads myself and his management [Al Haymon] to be more concerned with his well being, his mental health and his future than his boxing career.
“Right now there aren’t any plans to reschedule anything or think about his future in the ring until the events surrounding his legal issues are dealt with.”
“He was pointing at the kids, so I jumped in front of him again and said, ‘Please don’t shoot my kids,'” Smith said.
“Do I have bad luck, or do I have bad luck? I am getting so used to this,” Mora told ESPN.com about having his title shot canceled. “If I didn’t have Lou and [adviser] Al Haymon scrambling for me to get another opponent, I would be panicking. But I’m in a good place. I have a good team, and they are going to take care of things.”
“But I felt the bad news coming even before what happened [Monday],” Mora said. “I was training my ass off, but this is not the first time this has happened. I’m gonna keep training like I am fighting on Feb. 6 and headlining a card on ESPN2.”
