By Katie Carlin
Our friend, Taylor Cole, a resident of Crestline, California, was killed on Easter Sunday. According to police reports, he was riding his motorcycle on Highway 138 when an unidentified driver illegally crossed into his lane and struck him head on. As horrifying as the circumstances of his shocking death are, there is nothing about the way Taylor died that could overshadow the scale of the extraordinary life he lived.
Taylor was born in Fresno, CA, on September 6, 1980. Growing up, he enjoyed the proximity of his family home to Yosemite National Park. Later, he recalled to friends his avid teenage adventures and escapes into the park’s forests and onto its granite walls. In college at UC Riverside, he balanced being an extreme sports athlete and an engineering scholar, qualifying 23rd in the world in vert ramp rollerblading while completing his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Taylor later returned to UCR for a master’s degree in fluid mechanics, seeking to better understand the aerodynamic forces that govern the behavior of parachutes and wings.
Taylor began his professional career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona Division in 2003, working on electronic warfare systems. When Rear Admiral Archer Macy put out a call for anyone who could help with the IED crisis that was devastating troops, Taylor stayed up all night and wrote a paper he called “Seams Analysis,” laying out an entirely novel method to predict the patterns of improvised explosive devices. The success of his paper led to a new role as a tactical mathematician at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA, where he joined a team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and programmers to combat IEDs.
The team he built there was extraordinary. During a large-scale training exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, his unit completed a multi-week training plan in only a few days. As a result, he was called to answer to two senior Department of Defense officials. Sufficiently impressed, they empowered Taylor to build a new Navy Operations Research and Systems Analysis team dedicated to predictive analysis of human behavior. He lived in tents for nearly sixty months at Fort Irwin, learning how to apply math to operations of war, training multiple brigades deploying for combat on how to do pattern analysis to prevent the number one threat: encountering IEDs.
Taylor deployed to Bahrain under Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, modeling ship movements and analyzing IED patterns and carrier interactions in the Strait of Hormuz. He produced a three-month analysis on oil sanctions that caught the attention of the Navy’s CNO Strategic Studies Group. He received the Global War on Terrorism medal, a rare honor for a civilian, and was invited to move to Rhode Island for two years to study the art of strategic thinking, taking classes on military strategy at the Naval War College.
He rose to become Chief Technology Officer of NSWC Corona Division, where he drove the command’s culture of innovation, led its research and development programs, and mentored UC Riverside engineering students on projects the Navy actually needed.
Taylor grew up with a serious learning disability, undiagnosed until adulthood. Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) made it difficult for him to process and comprehend spoken language accurately. In times of conflict, he said, you could tell him “red” and he would hear “black.” Taylor expressed relief upon learning of his diagnosis, believing that his neurodivergence helped account for some of his difficulty with interpersonal relationships. Then, knowing how many children with autism spectrum disorder also had APD, Taylor went into personal debt to start a company to help them.
That company, Burble Creativity, developed an immersive storytelling environment for children that uses light and sound to engage both hemispheres of the brain. Taylor believed that as entertainment and media technology become more and more persuasive, the open-ended imagination a human can apply to storytelling diminishes. He theorized that prescriptive narratives in books, movies, and online games made it harder for kids and adults to express personal creativity, and that we should allow the listener to create and apply their own imagination to a story. This conviction is what led him to develop “Minimally Defined Immersion” technology, with early research showing promise not just for helping those with auditory processing disorder, but also for those with autism, ADHD, and PTSD.
Taylor was a seven-time national skydiving champion and a member of the United States Parachute Team. He competed in Canopy Formation, which is a discipline in which teams fly their open parachutes in close formation, docking on one another to build structures in the sky. In 2016, his team “Too Wrapped Up” won gold in four-way canopy formation at the National Parachuting Championships in Lake Wales, Florida. In October 2018, he earned a bronze medal at the FAI World Canopy Formation Championships in Gold Coast, Australia. In October 2022, he was part of the USA team that took silver at the World Championships in Eloy, Arizona.
Last November, he was part of the 104-way canopy formation at Lake Wales, Florida, that broke the world record for the largest formation ever built. The previous record had stood for eighteen years. Taylor teamed up with jumpers from twenty countries linking their parachutes into a massive diamond in the sky. The video of this feat is so surreally beautiful that it appears as if it were generated by artificial intelligence. You can find it on his instagram page @dweeble_kneivel
He was considered one of the top BASE jumpers in the world, with more than seventeen years of active jumping and over a thousand jumps to his name. It is unclear if he screamed, “YEAH, BUDDY!” each and every time he dove from a Building, Antenna, Span (bridge), Earth (cliff) but he certainly did most times.
He jumped from the world’s largest glass-bottom skywalk in Chongqing, China, 2,300 feet over the Yangtze River, for a televised audience of a million. He and his jumping partners made what they believed was the first-ever speed-flying descent of Cucamonga Peak (near Mount Baldy) launching from 8,800 feet after climbing in darkness from 3 a.m., and landing within feet of his car.
Once, during a four-way canopy rotation event, in which four jumpers connect their parachutes in a stack and rotate top to bottom as many times as they can in ninety seconds, Taylor’s reserve parachute deployed between the lines of his teammate Eric’s canopy. Both parachutes wrapped around him. Taylor was blind. Eric knew that if he cut away to save his own life, it would almost certainly kill Taylor. If they both rode the tangled mess down, they would both be killed or seriously injured. Eric stayed calm, determined a course of action, and they crash-landed together into a lake at the edge of the drop zone. Taylor called Eric a hero, and he defined “hero” as someone who set aside his own safety to care immensely for others.
As for Taylor Cole, there can be no easy definition. Taylor defied convention and he urged others to do the same. He had a mind and a heart not of this world, and to mourn him is to be in the company of Navy tacticians, BASE jumpers, bartenders, bikers, world champion skydivers, and several wildly upset, beautiful exes.
He was 45 years old. He was a father. He was an avid dancer. He was a pilot. He was a second place finisher on the television show “Wipe Out” — nearly winning a $50,000 prize at the end of the “World’s Largest” obstacle course. He loved and lived to the absolute limit.
As our friend, he was irresistible, even as some of us cautioned ourselves against getting so attached to a man who kept throwing himself out of airplanes and off of mountain tops.
We are grieving up here in the San Bernardino Mountains where he made his home.
We send our deepest condolences to his daughter, Tessa Cole.
We wanted more time with him.
We will never see his likeness again.
This tribute was submitted by Katie Carlin, a local writer and attorney who lives in Lake Arrowhead with her husband, Roel Deuss, and their sweet rescue pup, Opal.
If you were on Highway 138 on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, and witnessed anything suspicious near the scene around 5:20 PM, or have any information about the driver who fled the scene, please contact the California Highway Patrol, your local police department, sheriff’s office, or the US Navy. The vehicle that struck Taylor Cole was a gold Chrysler minivan, which was abandoned at the scene.
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