Greensburg Man Arrested Thursday for Fatally Shooting his Father

GREENSBURG, Ind. (WISH) — A 29-year-old Greensburg man was arrested Thursday in connection with the fatal shooting of his father, who was found dead in his rural home early Tuesday morning, court documents said.

Wyatt Taylor will be held in the Decatur County jail without bond until his murder case is adjudicated in Decatur Superior Court. Online court records on Thursday afternoon did not say when his initial hearing will be.

Deputies with the Decatur County Sheriff’s Department about 12:05 a.m. Tuesday went to check on Joshua Taylor, 50, after receiving a call from a concerned nephew. Joshua lived at a home in the 3300 block of South County Road 60 Southwest. That’s about 2 miles south of Greensburg in an area with a few houses and farms amid fields of crops and bodies of water.

Court documents say Wyatt had moved back home from Utah about two weeks earlier. He let police officers into the home, where they found Joshua dead in a first-floor bedroom. Wyatt was the only person in the home when officers arrived.

A preliminary autopsy conducted in Hamilton County, Ohio, later found Joshua died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head.

Investigators also found spent bullets in the bedroom and its bedding.

The total of bullets found would represent the entire capacity of a magazine in the handgun found at the home, investigators determined.

Chief Deputy Eric Blodget wrote in the court documents, “Upstairs in a bedroom, on the floor next to a mattress, we located a firearm of the same caliber as the spent casings. There was an empty magazine in the handgun that had the precise capacity as the number of spent casings. Also next to the firearm was a wallet with Wyatt Taylor’s driver’s license and a hat which was later identified as having been worn by Wyatt Taylor in the evening leading up to the event. Further, next to the firearm was a box of ammunition of the same caliber and manufacturer as the spent casings with in excess of the magazine capacity missing.”

Sheriff Bill Meyerrose and Detective Ally Sullivan interviewed Wyatt at the county jail shortly after he was taken into custody. Court documents said, “Wyatt described that Joshua had been ‘throwing up gang signs’ and that he was afraid for his life a few nights before. He described his father as ‘bipolar toward (Wyatt),’ and ‘very suicidal’ and ‘belligerent.’ He later said that he was ‘in fear of (his) life, extremely in fear of (his) life.”

Greensburg is about an hour’s drive southeast of downtown Indianapolis.