Photo: Unsplash
No one in their right minds wants to hear about the murder of children. And even fewer wish to report the details. But after much discussion as a staff, The Inertia decided that a follow-up story on surf school owner Mathew Taylor Coleman, who admitted to killing his children last week, was appropriate given the close ties to the surfing world, especially in a hub like Santa Barbara, California, and for the sake of accuracy, given that more sordid details have emerged.
Last Wednesday, we reported that Taylor Coleman, 40, who owned Lovewater Surf Co. in Santa Barbara with his wife, was arrested as he attempted to cross back into California from Tijuana (as reported by the Los Angeles Times). Taylor had apparently driven to Rosarito, 30 minutes south of Tijuana and checked into a hotel sometime Sunday. According to surveillance video, he left the hotel at 2:54 a.m. Monday morning with his two children and returned at around 6:33 a.m. without them.
The bodies of the two children were discovered at around 7:30 a.m. after Baja police received a tip via a 911 call. The children had been repeatedly stabbed in their chests. They were found by a farmworker near El Descanso Ranch, which is between Tijuana and Ensenada.
Further details released by federal investigators say Taylor Coleman was charged after admitting to the killings, and that he used a speargun in the crime. The reasons for the killings are even more bizarre and tragic: Taylor Coleman, who’d obviously lost his mind, said that he killed his children after he thought they “were going to grow into monsters” and that because of a belief in certain conspiracy theories, he thought his wife had passed down her “serpent DNA” to the young children (a three-year-old boy and 10-month-old girl).
The serpent DNA is apparently a reference to the “lizard people” conspiracy theory, that claims that “reptilian aliens secretly run the world and have taken over important positions in government, banking and Hollywood.” He told authorities he learned about the idea through the QAnon conspiracy theory, another false claim that an imagined “global cabal” is running the U.S. government and former President Trump was trying to stop it.
A friend of Taylor Coleman’s interviewed by a mainstream media pub said that he and the former surf school owner had a conservative circle of friends. But Taylor Coleman had taken the conspiracy ideas a step further. “He’d tell me about stuff he read online,” the anonymous source told the publication. “Conspiracies. But he’d present it like, ‘I read something really crazy. Isn’t that ridiculous? But then he’d start adding things like, ‘yeah, but when you think about it, it all makes a lot of sense.’ It was like he was starting to believe them. And he spent a lot of time looking at these conspiracies. He devoted a lot of brain power to them. It became clear to me that he believed some weird stuff.”
The friend also said Taylor Coleman never gave any indication that he would do something like this.
Authorities said that the mother filed a missing persons report last Sunday when she couldn’t notify Taylor Coleman, knowing he didn’t have a car seat. Police then asked her to use Apple’s Find My iPhone app to help them locate him.
He confessed to the killings after he was apprehended by police.
Editor’s Note: The mother and family of these young children is suffering in unimagineable ways. Please consider donating to a GoFundMe campaign set up for them. You can find that here.
