Rapper Tay-K – real name Taymor McIntyre – has been sentenced to 55 years in prison for murdering 21-year-old Ethan Walker during an armed robbery.
The incident took place in a town near Dallas, Texas back in 2016, when McIntyre and six other defendants in the case stormed the house of a man named Zachary Beloate to rob money and drugs he’d supposedly stashed at his home.
Upon arrival, the armed defendants found none of the things that they were after, and it was then that McIntyre reportedly shot Walker, a friend of Beloate who’d been over at the time, during a struggle that took place when the robbers were about to leave.
The bulk of McIntyre’s initial defence stemmed from his legal team arguing that he didn’t fire the shot that took Walker’s life, although this was soon disproved.
Subsequently, McIntyre was placed under house arrest during preliminary investigations, before soon cutting his ankle monitor and fleeing. It was during his time on the run from authorities, in 2017, that he recorded his viral, platinum-certified single ‘The Race.’
In the lyrics, the 19-year-old rapper described his time evading capture from the police, and it was the nature of the song’s content that compelled prosecutors in court to use the song as evidence against him.
Later during the year, McIntyre also conducted robberies at the Texan cities of San Antonio and Arlington, which form the basis for the other two of the three aggravated robbery charges that have been handed to him.
In addition to his sentence, McIntyre has also been ordered to pay a $21,000 fine, with a separate case from Walker’s family suing the rapper for almost a million dollars in damages, to be taken from his song profits, remains pending as of yet.