Widow Recalls Panic at Husband’s Kidnapping

A tearful widow told jurors Thursday that she was “panicked, terrified and worried about my husband” after Christopher Rawlings was kidnapped from their Woodland Hills home in the trunk of his Bentley.

Barbie Rawlings said she could not identify the two men she saw in her garage on the night of Feb. 8, 1999, because they wore black ski masks.

But she identified a gold Cartier earring and matching bracelet that police said they found in defendant Kirell Taylor’s Pacoima home as the type stolen from her bedroom that night.

Taylor, 26, is charged with the kidnapping, robbery and murder of Christopher Rawlings, a 30-year-old businessman, and the carjacking of driver Maria Vasquez as he tried to escape from the Rawlings crime scene. If convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

He is representing himself during trial in the Van Nuys courtroom of Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Hoff.

Authorities said Taylor is one of two men who waited for Rawlings to return home from a grocery store about 9 p.m. The men followed Rawlings into the garage, where they overpowered him and put him in the trunk before driving away. After a high-speed pursuit by police, the white Bentley ran into a car and spun, hitting a power pole and knocking out electricity to the area, then crashed into a tree.

When the car stopped, the trunk flew open and Rawlings was thrown 30 feet headfirst into a brick wall, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie Samuels. He died two days later.

Earlier that night, Barbie Rawlings said, she heard the car pull into the garage with the stereo blasting and waited for her husband to come into the house.

“The loud music was normal,” she testified. “When I heard voices, men’s voices, I wondered what was going on.”

She walked quietly into the garage to investigate. “When I walked out there, I saw two men standing above my husband,” she said. She heard one of them tell the victim to “get down.” She left the garage unnoticed, ran upstairs for her two young children and climbed out of a third-story window onto the roof, where she called 911 on a cellular phone, she said.

From that vantage point, she saw the Bentley back out of the driveway and depart, she said.

A few miles away, near the crash site, neighbors recalled seeing a man dressed in dark clothes run through their gated Tarzana cul-de-sac shortly after the power went out.

One neighbor said he spoke briefly to the man as he ran down the private street and into another neighbor’s yard. The second neighbor identified Taylor as the man she saw walk past her window that night.

She said she heard a noise on the right side of the house, “like something crashed through the gate.” A few minutes later, she said, she looked out an 8-foot window and saw a man walk into her backyard.

The witness said the intruder was walking “very slowly, very cautiously. . . . He seemed like he was trying to [avoid] helicopter lights overhead.”