BATON ROUGE — Police have added a new charge against accused serial rapist Jeremiah Taylor, as the courts plan to see if Taylor is competent to assist in his own defense.
Police got a warrant Wednesday charging Taylor with sexual battery and obscenity in a January incident in which he is alleged to have rubbed his privates against a woman’s buttocks in a North Sherwood Forest Boulevard laundromat.
The crime happened Jan. 18 at the laundromat at 1634 North Sherwood Forest. According to the warrant, a woman was inside the laundromat when a man rubbed against her. She gave police a description of the man, but they couldn’t find him immediately after the assault.
After police released Taylor’s photograph in the rape of a 94-year-old woman a week ago, the laundromat victim contacted investigators and said Taylor was the man who committed the crime, the warrant said. She later picked him out of a photo lineup, the warrant said.
Taylor was in court briefly Thursday for a hearing to set a date to decide whether Taylor is competent to work with his own lawyers on his defense. Dressed in an orange prison uniform, he had a chain around his waist connecting to his handcuffs. He didn’t speak during the hearing.
District Court Judge Tarvald Smith said Taylor should return to court on May 11, when the three doctors appointed to a sanity commission will need to have completed reports based on their examination of Taylor.
Smith ordered Taylor held without bond and ordered that he remain at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison so doctors and defense attorneys can meet with him.
A week ago, police released a photograph a man who had raped a 94-year-old woman. He was quickly identified and arrested. Since then, a troubling criminal history has emerged. Taylor was arrested in 2024 in two rapes of the same woman, but the charges were dropped in January 2026 because prosecutors could not find the victim to appear in court.
In light of Taylor’s arrest in the most recent rape, District Attorney Hillar Moore said he was reviving the two 2024 charges against Taylor that had been dismissed.
Earlier this week, police got an additional warrant in a 2023 rape involving the same victim as those in 2024. Taylor has been booked with violation of a protective order after he is alleged to have gone to that victim’s home within hours of his release in January.
That victim reported the violation immediately, but police did not get a warrant to arrest Taylor on the protective order violation until hours after the 94-year-old woman was attacked. Police have not answered questions about the delay in pursuing his arrest on the protective order violation and whether it should have been a higher priority given how quickly the alleged violation occurred.
Police also have not answered questions about the timing of DNA testing on samples collected after the 2023 rape, which left the victim with a bite mark on a breast and a man’s DNA on her private area.
Moore said the backlog of rape kits in need of testing and the limited capacity of the state police crime lab means that police have to “triage” testing of those kits by selecting which ones have the greatest probability of a DNA test cracking the case or confirming the identification of a particular suspect.
The warrant in the 2023 case was signed Tuesday. It said that was the same day an officer was “reassigned to further investigate” that case.
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