(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

Derrick ‘Bo’ Taylor, 56

from Oxnard, Calif.

Derrick “Bo” Taylor wasn’t sure he would make it to the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. His companion had given him tickets for his 56th birthday, but days before the first country singers took the stage, Taylor was 550 miles from his home in Southern California.

Taylor, a state correctional officer for 29 years, was overseeing a team of inmates helping battle a wildfire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, in the northern part of the state. Lightning started what was called the Berry Fire on Sept. 12. It burned nearly 1,000 acres before it was under control Sept. 28, just in time for Taylor to make his trip.

He was killed, along with his companion, Denise Cohen, three days later.

“He was a real gentleman,” said Leana Orsua, who was friends with both Cohen and Taylor.

Taylor and Cohen had met about three years ago. She lived in Carpinteria, he 30 miles down the California coast in Oxnard. Orsua said the couple’s romantic relationship had slowed in the past year, though they remained close friends.

They flew together to Las Vegas and checked into a hotel on the Strip, about two miles from the concert venue. They posed for a picture, standing arm in arm in front of a Budweiser sign.

On Wednesday, Taylor’s son Kyle, 31, said he was in Las Vegas waiting for the coroner to release his father’s body. He thought of his own sons, 2 and 4, and his brother’s three children, recalling how his father, strict with him, had softened once he became a grandfather of five.

“With my little ones, he was different,” Kyle said. “I’d tell them don’t make a mess and he’d tell me to just leave them alone.” Taylor made a competition out of everything, organizing races to the swing or chasing the 2-year-old around the sandbox. “He just liked to play.”

At work, Taylor was a respected lieutenant who was liked by his staff and inmates, who, once free, frequently approached him when they saw him in public and thanked him for his help. “’I got a job. I’m doing good,’” Kyle said he heard all too often.

The son added, “People liked him.”

Taylor was a supervisor at the Sierra Conservation Center, a minimum- and maximum-security prison outside Oxnard that trains inmates in firefighting techniques and then helps place them in jobs when they are released.

About 110 inmates there were assigned to “camps” led by Taylor, who took them in groups to forests and wildfires around the state. They were sometimes gone for weeks or months at a time. While there, the inmates, under the direction of state firefighters, hiked into mountains and forests, clearing brush and trees to create fire lines to prevent flames from advancing. They did not fight the actual fires, but their work was grueling and dangerous.

Taylor had been in charge of such camps for 17 years.

For part of August and all of September, Taylor took his inmate team on the road, hitting several fires in the state. The last, the Berry Fire, burned nearly 1,000 acres over 16 days near California’s largest national forest.

“I just met Lieutenant Taylor at the Berry Fire,” one person wrote jn a tribute on the website for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “My husband and I were doing laundry for the crews. He would come by and we would visit. He was such a wonderful man.”

Said another: “Unbelievable. If you crossed paths with Bo Taylor you were blessed to have known him.”

Kyle described his father as an easygoing man who didn’t take his stressful job home and liked nothing more than to take his grandchildren to the park.

He said his father once told him, “It doesn’t hurt to be nice.”

— Peter Hermann

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