The body of two-year-old toddler Taylen Mosley was tragically found in the mouth of an alligator. Police quickly arrested the animal responsible for his death. That would be his father, Thomas Mosley, who also killed the boy’s mother. St. Petersburg PD had a busy week.
Tragic end for toddler
Police in St. Petersburg, Florida started searching for the missing toddler around 2:30 p.m., when they found his mom, 20-year-old Pashun Jeffery, dead from “multiple stab wounds.” A trail of blood led from her apartment to her vehicle but 2-year-old Taylen was nowhere to be found.
The amber alert came to a tragic end Friday evening, March 31, when “the child’s body was found inside an alligator’s mouth.” How it ended up there remains a mystery until the investigation unwinds.
As related by Chief Anthony Holloway, “officers were investigating the area of Dell Holmes Park when they spotted an alligator with ‘an object in its mouth‘ inside Lake Maggiore.” That particular lake happens to be 14 miles north of where the boy lived with his mother.
#BREAKING: The body of Taylen Mosley, the 2-year-old Florida boy who had been the subject of a frantic search after his mother was slain, has been found in a lake in the jaws of an alligator, St. Petersburg Police said. https://t.co/MFeFTRSds3
— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) April 1, 2023
That means he didn’t run out of the apartment to hide where a gator could get him. The toddler was taken there. “Officers fired a round at the alligator, killing it, and forcing it to drop the child’s body.”
Police note that though Taylen’s body was retrieved, it isn’t clear “how the boy died or if he was dead before he ended up in the lake.” Either way, they charged his father with two counts of first-degree murder.
If he didn’t feed the toddler to an alligator directly, he left the boy where a gator could grab him. Hopefully, he wasn’t still alive at the time. “We are sorry that it had to end this way,” Chief Holloway laments.
A person of interest
The moment Thomas Mosley showed up at the emergency room of a local hospital, police named him a “person of interest.” Especially because he checked himself in with “cuts to his hands into his arms.” Those are the kinds of “defensive wounds” police look for whenever anyone is attacked with a knife.
While that seems to tie him to the deaths of the toddler and his mom pretty conclusively, “police wouldn’t say whether the injuries could have been sustained by Jeffery in self-defense.” The chief did point out that “nothing in our investigation leads us to believe that he is a victim.” Meaning nobody else attacked him along with his family.
As soon as the mom was found dead, the department issued an Amber alert and “launched a major volunteer search for the boy out of extreme concern he was in danger.”
#BREAKING NEWS: Missing toddler Taylen Mosley's body found in alligator's mouth, chief says https://t.co/Enq3RyMBGw pic.twitter.com/IgipeAFMXP
— WFLA NEWS (@WFLA) April 1, 2023
They even went looking for the toddler in the local bodies of water. “Officers deployed dive teams in nearby retention ponds before moving 14 miles north of Taylen and Jeffery’s home, where they ultimately found the boy’s body.”
According to Lakita Denson, “He’s always calling his mom on his cell phone. He miss his mom, they calling each other all the time. She really loved Taylen.”
The extended family of the toddler are still in shock. Theo Brickhouse-Sails adds, “we just want to say that Taylen is a beautiful little boy. He’s really loving and caring.“
