BOWIE COUNTY, Texas (KTAL/KMSS) – Frantic 911 calls from both Taylor Parker and Jessica Brookes from the morning Reagan Hancock was brutally murdered were played in court Wednesday morning, following a series of witness testimony placing Parker at a gas station less than two miles from the crime scene just before the New Boston mother was killed.
Jurors also watched police bodycam and dashcam video from the traffic stop scene where Parker was pulled over on the morning of the murder with the baby prosecutors say she cut from Reagan’s womb lifeless in her lap. They also heard heartbreaking testimony from Reagan’s husband.
The following is testimony as it unfolded starting at 9 a.m. on the seventh day of the trial.
EZ Mart surveillance video places Parker near crime scene
The courtroom is packed. Up first on the stand, EZ Mart store manager Trista Griffin (no relation to Wade Griffin, apparently). A receipt shows Taylor paid $10 for gas at 6:46 a.m. Photos from surveillance cameras show Parker at the register paying for the gas.
This EZ Mart is a four-minute drive from Reagan Hancock’s house on Austin St., 1.8 miles away.
Next on the stand is TX DPS Special Agent Eric Estes, who got the search warrant for the surveillance video and transaction records from the EZ Mart from the morning of the murders between 6:30 and 7 a.m.
There was an issue with the video that did not allow it to be saved, but they have the stills. In the surveillance image, she is wearing a black jacket with leopard print lining the hoodie and a white t-shirt.
Next, the jury sees a photo taken from Parker’s phone of Parker inside a McDonald’s restaurant on Oct. 8, wearing what appears to be the same jacket.
Evidence establishes how Taylor Parker and Reagan Hancock knew each other
Estes also wrote the search warrant for Reagan Hancock’s Facebook account. We see contacts between Reagan and Taylor going back to Sept. 2019, when Taylor photographed Reagan’s wedding. We see that Reagan sent Taylor a message via Facebook on Oct. 7, two days before the murder, thanking her for” the sweet gift and Starbucks card!”
Previous testimony and evidence presented in the trial included receipts that show Parker purchased the Talkatone app for 99 cents on the morning of Oct. 8. It’s a VOIP app that allows users to call and text over the internet. One minute later, she texts herself.
We know from previous testimony Taylor Parker has a history of using these apps to text herself and others. Reagan’s phone records show that she was also communicating with a spoofed number connected to Parker and later her husband, Homer, on the morning of the murder.
The State also shows a series of Reagan’s Facebook posts announcing her pregnancy with Braxlynn and counting down over the months.
Estes says Reagan’s cell phone was never recovered.
Video, testimony puts Parker’s car at Hancock house at time of murder
Next on the stand: The New Boston ISD. Director of Technology, who downloaded security video footage from the bus that passes by Reagan’s house on Austin St. from the morning of the murder.
The jury bus footage from the bus camera, looking down Austin St. as the bus heads east. We see Reagan’s house in the curve as the street turns south. There’s a utility trailer parked beside the driveway. The garage door is down and there are no cars in the driveway. The timestamp shows it is 7:22 a.m.
Reagan’s neighbor Patricia Bradford takes the stand and testifies to seeing an unfamiliar dark-colored Toyota Corolla with mismatched rims parked in front of the house sometime between 7:30 and 7:40 a.m. that day as she pulled out of her driveway headed to work. Her son works at night, so he usually sleeps during the day but she got a call from him a little after 10 a.m. saying something was going on next door. Someone is screaming or crying. She told him to go make sure they were alright. She rushes home and arrives to find chaos.
No questions from the defense. Testimony has been fast-paced this morning. We’ve heard from 4 witnesses in just over an hour.
Neighbors knock on Hancock’s door, find it ajar; no one answers
Next, the jury hears from Brittany Thompson, who lives across the street from the Hancocks. Brittany says she knows Homer from school. She was getting ready to go to Walmart with her mother, Andrea Wyrick, around 7:45 a.m. when she noticed the Hancock’s new black lab puppy was wandering in the street. The garage was up, and Reagan’s car was in the garage. She didn’t have Reagan’s number, so she messaged Homer on Facebook to let him know the puppy was out.
Brittany Thompson breaks down crying on the stand, recalling how she followed her mom over to the Hancock’s house after seeing her go into the garage, approach the door inside, and knock. The door was not pulled all the way shut, so it opened slightly. No one answered. Brittany says she texted Homer again to let him know the door was open and no one was answering.
Homer texts Brittany to tell her he’s going to try to call Reagan. Brittany and her mother lifted the puppy over the Hancock’s back fence and headed out shopping. At 10:35 a.m. Brittany got a thirty-second call from Homer as she was walking into Walmart. He tells her “My wife is dead.” Brittany is crying on the stand.
“I was in shock for a second. I was like, “‘What?! We were just over there!'”
Brittany describes seeing a dark-colored sedan outside the Hancock’s home the night before.
Her mother takes the stand next, describing how she knocked on the door and it opened slightly. Despite knocking and calling out, there was no response.
Jury hears frantic 911 calls from Taylor Parker, Jessica Brookes
It is now 11 a.m. and the jury has already heard from five witnesses. We’re about to hear the 911 calls. It is expected to be difficult to hear. Judge John Tidwell excuses the jury briefly to warn observers that they should leave now if they feel they can’t maintain composure. Several family members leave. Others pass around tissue boxes.
New Boston PD 911 dispatcher Katie Jiminez takes the stand. She took two separate 911 calls the morning of the murders. One at 9:36 a.m. from Taylor Parker, the other between 10:15-18 a.m. from Reagan’s mother, Jessica Brookes.
On the 911 call from Taylor Parker, we hear her crying and telling the dispatcher, “I have a state trooper behind me and I need an ambulance because I started having my baby!”
The dispatcher notes it appears Taylor is at 780 W Front St. In DeKalb, relays to LifeNet that she says she’s gone into labor and that she has a state trooper behind her. He was pulling in behind her when she called.
They ask what number she’s calling from. She’s saying she has to get to Idabel.
“That’s where my doctor is!” Parker cries. “I started having my baby!”
More crying.
Now the jury hears the 911 call from Jessica Brookes.
“Help me! My daughter’s been murdered!” Brookes frantically tells the dispatcher, who asks what happened. Brookes is so distraught it is hard to make out everything she is saying.
“I don’t know! Somebody (unintelligible)…there’s blood everywhere! Oh, my babies! Oh my God!”
The dispatcher tells Brookes that officers are on their way.
Brookes can be heard crying and calling out to her husband Marcus, who went over to the house with her that morning after Homer called and asked her to check on Reagan. She is asking Marcus, “Did they hurt her? I can’t do this. My baby, my baby, my baby!”
Jessica is heard asking if Kynlee, Reagan’s 3-year-old daughter, is okay.
“I can’t tell what happened. Did they just hurt her? What did they do? There’s so much blood. There’s so much blood!”
Three minutes into the call, Kynlee is heard asking, “Where’s mommy?”
The dispatcher hangs up as police arrive. No questions from the defense. People in the courtroom are sniffling.
Dispatch, radio calls; Taylor Parker called 911 as trooper pulled her over
The jury hears dispatch recordings from the scene of the traffic stop in De Kalb. The trooper tells the dispatcher the baby is not breathing and that she (Taylor) is doing CPR right now. He tells dispatch where they are, which is right across from DeKalb Middle School on US 82.
Taylor is heard yelling, “We gotta get to Idabel, there’s where my doctor is! I’m not going to St. Michael’s!”
At this point, Taylor was also on the phone with 911 dispatcher.
Taylor continues to insist on going to Idabel, not CHRISTUS St. Michaels in Texarkana or Titus Regional Medical Center, crying as she pleads with the trooper.
“Please, just put us in your car, I’m begging you!”
“How old is the baby?” the trooper asks.
“The baby is only like maybe 35 minutes old!” Taylor responds.
After playing this recording, First Assistant District Attorney Lauren Richards asks the dispatcher on the stand, “Is that the same as someone saying, “I’ve started having my baby?”
“No.”
Meanwhile, the other call is going on simultaneously with EMS. The LifeNet dispatcher asks Parker if the baby was just born. LifeNet dispatch asks a few questions about whether the baby is breathing or if there is any green stuff in the nose or mouth, and gives her CPR instructions.
Taylor can be heard saying, “Come on Clancy, come on!”
“I’m going to Idabel! Okay, then I’ll take myself!” she tells the trooper. “I refuse to go to St. Michaels. I don’t want to go to St. Michael’s I want to go to Idabel. My doctor is in Oklahoma! Please!”
We also hear a portion of Taylor’s end of a call to Wade, telling him, “I started having her, I could not drive! I was trying to push a baby out! The ambulance is here!”
The defense asks a few questions, apparently to confirm the timeline of the events during the stop and to confirm there is a video corresponding to this event. The dispatcher confirms there is.
Richards returns for two more questions to clarify that the trooper’s body cam would not have captured everything because it moves with him. so the entire call to Wade would not be captured on it. The dispatcher also confirms sometimes Parker was crying, sometimes she wasn’t, depending on who she was addressing.
As testimony ends, Taylor sits with her elbow on the defense table, holding her head in her hand.
Hog deal orchestrated by Taylor Parker has Wade Griffin 4 hours away on morning of murder
After the break, the first witness on the stand after recess for lunch is the owner of Side X Side Ranch in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Scott Robinson buys hogs for clients to hunt and shoot on his land. He says a “Taylor Griffin” cold-called him on Sept. 22 to try to sell him some hogs. They start to negotiate, but there are red flags. She doesn’t know about the license you have to have to transport livestock. And she wanted the money up front.
“That was a little weird, but not a deal breaker for me,” Robinson testified. But he also thought it was odd for someone who wanted to sell 150 hogs not to know what kind of license they need to have.
“That’s a huge load. At that point, I started questioning the legitimacy of the deal.”
She initially tells him she’s coming from Texas but changes it to Oklahoma after he tells her he can’t take livestock from outside the state. There is some confusion on her part about the cost of a license. He ultimately tells her he doesn’t think she’s telling the truth and calls off the deal. “Good luck,” he says.
Taylor texted him again five days later, claiming not to have seen Robinson’s last message until just then. She offers excuses for her previous confusion about transport licensing and says she’s gotten it straightened out. Robinson is still not interested,
Two weeks later, at 7:35 a.m. on Oct. 9, Wade showed up at the Side X Side Ranch, uninvited and unexpected. Robinson was not only surprised because he wasn’t expecting anyone but annoyed because Wade pulled his gooseneck trailer loaded with hogs right up to the front of the lodge, where he hosts clients. He tells his ranch hands to tell him to move.
He has no idea who Wade Griffin is. When he gets out there, he finds Griffin with his trailer, stuck about a half-mile into the woods.
By this time, Robinson says, he has been told he owes “this guy” $6,100 for hogs he hasn’t ordered. So he is already irritated when he tells him he has not ordered any hogs. Robinson is thinking this might be a scam. Maybe they tried to sell them somewhere else and couldn’t and now they were trying to pawn these hogs off on him.
Wade says he has an order for him and shows him texts on his phone.
“I said, “That’s not even my phone number. And it’s acting as if it’s me and it’s not me. “
“Wade this is Scott,” the text says. “I will see you both in the morning around 6:30-7. Taylor said check made out to Wade Griffin, check total $6,100. I have seven groups of hunters this weekend need those hogs tomorrow for sure. Turned two guys away today with hogs. Drive safe. I’ll send address for GPS. Thanks man.”
Robinson says he did not write that text. It was an Oklahoma number, and his has a Dallas area code because he never changed it when he moved here.
Robinson says he finally started to make the connection when he sees that Wade’s last name is Griffin. He remembers the scrapped deal with “Taylor Griffin.” He pulls up the real text conversation they had on his phone and shows it to Wade and tells him he told her two weeks ago that he was not doing business with them.
“‘This is not from me,'” Robins says he told Wade. “‘This is a bogus deal. I didn’t want ’em, I didn’t order ’em and I’m not doing this deal,'” before telling his ranch manager to show Wade out.
“Someone is pretending to be me. Here he is, stuck. It was a crap show from the beginning.”
He hears Wade telling someone on phone, presumably Taylor, “This guy says he doesn’t want these hogs.”
Robinson headed back to the lodge. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was over. But the ranch hand manager came back a short time later and asked Robinson if he would reconsider if he could get a good deal. Robinson wasn’t interested and wouldn’t touch them anyway without proper licensing.
“I said, ‘You couldn’t give ’em to me.'”
But Griffin is telling the ranch manager he needs to get rid of these hogs. He’d driven 4 hours with them. The heat of the day was coming. Griffin and the ranch manager ended up striking a deal for less than the asking price, at about $2,500
All told, Wade was there for a couple of hours before he finally left the ranch between 9:30 and 10 a.m.
Body and dashcam show bloodied, distraught Parker with lifeless baby
Next on the stand is Leonzel Shavers, the Texas DPS trooper that pulled Parker over after he saw her speeding and driving erratically as she headed west on US 82 in Idabel around 9:30 a.m. on the morning of the murders. She had her hazard lights on He says he watched her nearly hit a pickup truck and would have if the driver of the truck hadn’t taken evasive action. Then she swerved over the double-yellow line and then back toward the shoulder, before nearly hitting a bicyclist.
It’s a 2009 Toyota Corolla registered to Wade Griffin. As he pulls up, the driver is waving out the window, urging him to come quickly. As he approaches, he hears a frantic female voice. She’s on the phone with 911. He asks her what’s wrong and sees a newborn baby in her lap. The umbilical cord was still attached with the other end tucked into her yoga pants.
She tells him she’s trying to get to the hospital in Idabel. Tpr. Shavers says he thought it was unusual, as most emergency transports go to St. Michael’s or Titus Regional Medical Center. He asks her why she doesn’t want to go to either of those. She tells him she needs to get to Idabel because her doctor is already there and that’s where her husband is expecting to meet her. She is crying, pleading, and telling the trooper that St. Michaels had “hurt her last baby.” He identifies Parker sitting in the courtroom. He says there was no one else was in the car but Parker and the baby.
Video shows Parker looking distraught, holding up the phone, as she is still connected to 911. She cries and tells him she just had a baby. Shavers testified that he noticed the hand with the phone was shaking, but the other hand, on the baby in her lap, was perfectly still. The baby did not appear to be moving or breathing.
Shavers testifies as stills and video is shown from dash and bodycams on the scene. He says Taylor had blood on her face, some on her clothes, and a lot on her snake-print crocs and feet. We see photos of this.
Shavers says Parker had hit a bird with the car. We see a picture of a large bird stuck in the bumper. It’s a hawk. He says a bird that far under the bumper indicates the vehicle was moving at a pretty high rate of speed by the time it was hit.
Shavers says the hawk walked off when they freed it.
A woman who stopped to help stepped in to give the baby CPR. Later, she and an off-duty EMT decided they need to take Taylor’s yoga pants off, believing she just gave birth. They got some trauma shears and cut them off. As they were cutting off the pants, the placenta fell on the floorboard. They changed her into a pair of pajama pants they found in her car.
Dashcam video shows Taylor being walked to the trooper’s vehicle, moving slowly, as if she’s hurting.
First Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp points Shavers’ attention to the v-neck Parker is seen wearing in the bodycam video. Crisp asks about whether he saw Taylor wearing any kind of “high-neck top” during the traffic stop. He says no. Crisp pulls up the surveillance image of the open-toed white strappy sandals Parker was wearing at the EZ Mart. Did the trooper see open-toed white strappy sandals at the scene in Idabel? No.
The woman who stopped to help, we’ll later learn, is an employee of the school across the street. Amanda Pirkey is trained as a nurse and maintains her certification.
In the police unit, we see video of Pirkey wiping the blood off of Parker’s face and giving her a wet paper towel to wipe her hands. Parker is intermittently crying, looking around, talking to the trooper and Pirkey, and demanding to know what’s taking so long to tell her what is happening with the baby.
She tells the trooper she’s seeing a holistic midwife in Oklahoma.
After Taylor was removed from the vehicle, the trooper found the umbilical cord and placenta still in the car. We see photos of both on the floorboard. Shavers says he notified EMS and they collected them with a biohazard bag. No blood is visible on the driver’s seat.
Parker is moved to a gurney. She is still yelling that she wants to go to Idabel. As they’re loading her up, Tpr. Chaver notices her white, snake-print crocs are still in his vehicle, so he takes them out and puts them in the ambulance with Perkins.
We see video of Parker being helped onto a gurney as an EMT asks questions about what happened. She tells them she was on her way to Idabel when she gave birth. She starts crying again. After she’s in the ambulance, she asks if the baby is okay.
Shavers says Perkins moved Parker’s car to a nearby parking lot. He was not involved in processing it. At this point, no one on the scene is aware yet of what has just been discovered at the Hancock’s home in New Boston or how the two women are connected.
Passerby gives stolen baby CPR, cleans blood off Taylor Parker
Amanda Pirkey works at the school across the street from where Parker was pulled over. She maintains her nursing certification. She was headed back to the school from picking up a prescription when she looked over and saw the Corolla on the side of the road with the driver’s side door open and what looked like a small child sitting on someone’s lap.
Pirkey says she got to the overpass, but her gut told her to turn back. Something was wrong. She started googling infant CPR to refresh her memory in case that was the situation. She asked the trooper if there was a baby in distress. There was. The baby was lifeless, kind of blue around the mouth, cold, and clammy. She started doing chest compressions on the baby in Parker’s lap.
Pirkey says the baby did not look like one that had just been born. It’s usually messy. They’re covered in blood and vernix. This baby looked like she had been wiped off. But at the time, Pirkey says, she just assumed it was a baby that had just been born and she focused on doing what she needed to do.
After EMTs arrived, they were asking Taylor what her due date was. She said it was the 30th. The nurse said, “Oh, she’s early,” assuming she meant October, Pirkey recalled. Parker corrected her and told her the due date was in September.
“And we both looked at each other because she was small. So we were kind of concerned for that.”
They were asking her what happened. She told them she was at Walmart in New Boston when she felt pressure, left and got in car. She said she felt the need to pus and the baby came out while she was driving. Pirkey testified about how she was “screaming” about going to Idabel and insisting that she was not going to St. Michael’s or Titus.
The jury sees photos of the inside of the car. There was a lot in there. A pillow, a soft-sided cooler with close in it. Pirkey saw that Parker had two phones: a flip phone and a larger smartphone.
Pirkey says while they were talking, Taylor commented to her about how they both have older children and new babies. Parker was disheveled. She had dark circles under her eyes, but Pirkey thought maybe she was abused.
Pirkey says Parker wanted to clean up.
“’Can I get this stuff off me?'” Pirkey recalls her asking. “‘I want to get this blood off me.’” This is when Pirkey got the paper towels and water bottles. She gave her one to drink and used the other to clean her face. She says she gave Parker a towel to clean her hands off because they had blood all over them. As she did that, she cleaned one of Parker’s feet. Parker reached down and did the other, commenting something like, “‘This grosses me out,’ or, ‘This disgusts me,” Pirker recalls, adding that Parker made a gagging noise after saying it.
She says she also heard Taylor say when she was cleaning the blood off with the towel, “she’s all over me.”
Pirkey says the blood she was cleaning off of Parker’s face and body looked dry.
When they helped Parker to the trooper’s car after changing her into clean pajama pants, Pirkey says she acted shaky and weak, like dead weight. She sat gingerly when got into the car. Pirkey testified that Parker did not make any mention of bleeding until she was sitting in the trooper’s unit. Parker says she stuck her hands down her pants and said she was still bleeding.
Pirkey says she rinsed the crocs out some after the trooper brought them to the ambulance.
“I was 100% sure she had birthed the child,” Pirkey testified, adding that she even asked for her number so she could call her to check up on her and the baby.
EMTs ultimately took Parker to McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel, where doctors determined he had not given birth. She was arrested within hours and charged with capital murder and kidnapping. She would later confess to faking her pregnancy and cutting the baby from Reagan Hancock’s womb.
Reagan Hancock’s widowed husband takes the stand
Homer Hancock was the last to take the stand Wednesday. He chokes up as he testifies that he and Reagan were together more than five years before they married on Sept. 21, 2019. Today would have been their three-year anniversary.
Reagan’s daughter, Kynlee, is not his biological daughter.
State shows engagement photos. Taylor took these and their wedding photos. Homer gets emotional as First ADA Lauren Richards asks him about where they lived and he tells her the addresses of their previous home and the one they lived in on Austin Street where Reagan was killed.
They wanted a baby of their own. They got pregnant. When they learned it was a girl, they named her Braxlynn Sage.
Taylor was at the Hancock’s house the night before the murders.
On Oct. 8, 2020, he got home around 7:15 p.m. They sat down to eat dinner as a family. Taylor Parker was coming over. They did not discuss why she was coming over, but they were “somewhat friends.” Taylor’s name had been coming up during that week, Reagan had seen. Homer doesn’t know what they did or where they went, but he knows Taylor gave Reagan a baby gift.
Reagan and Taylor visited in the couple’s breakroom for 45 minutes or so. He was ready to go to bed, so texted her. They headed to the room that will be Braxlynn’s nursery. He heard them talking about Taylor helping decorate it. He went to bed. He doesn’t know what time Parker left.
He starts getting texts from Reagan around 7 a.m. Some of it sounded like her, but the tone changed. “That wasn’t the way she talked.
”What’s the deal, is something wrong?” She seemed to be trying to start a conversation. This is not typical of her, at least not in this way. She tells him she just wants to be happy and it’s just not working. They text back and forth, but something is off. When whoever was texting from Reagan’s phone seemed to be ending the conversation, Homer replies at 8:33 a.m. replies, “I love you.”
Reagan never responded.
An hour later, at 9:34 a.m, he got a Facebook message from Brittany about the puppy. He tried to call Reagan at 9:36. She didn’t answer. He grew concerned. That wasn’t like her. Brittany had told him the garage door was up. He says that door always stayed shut. He started heading back to New Boston from where he works in Texarkana. He is calling people, family, the daycare, whoever he thinks can get there quickly. He tries Reagan’s phone again at 9:58. 10:02, 10:04, 10:06, 10:20.
The crime scene tape was already up when he got there. Kynlee was in the driveway. They didn’t let him inside. Paramedics came and left. He learned his wife was dead.
He hasn’t been back except to get his things.
Prosecutors showed a picture from the house of a white, snake-print croc in the Hancock home.
It looks exactly like the bloody pair Parker was wearing when she was pulled over.
Testimony continues Thursday morning at the Bowie County Courthouse.
