He Told 911 It Was an Allergic Reaction | The Murder of Jade Benning

He told 911 it was an allergic reaction. The lab found cocaine.

On the night of February 25, 2023, a man called 911 from a Nashville apartment and told the dispatcher his girlfriend was having an allergic reaction. She was 24 years old and five months pregnant with a daughter she had already named Ivy. Her unborn daughter died two days later. Jade Benning died on March 6, 2023 — her 25th birthday.

The man who made the call

Blaise Taylor was a former Arkansas State defensive back, the son of longtime college football coach Trooper Taylor, and for roughly four years a scout in the Tennessee Titans’ personnel department. Prosecutors said he had put a massive quantity of cocaine, dissolved in alcohol, into a glass of pink lemonade during what was meant to be a date night, because he did not want the child born.

The last phone call

One minute before he dialled 911, Jade called her best friend. What that friend heard was not Jade talking to her. It was Jade talking to Blaise, in her own voice, saying: you put something in my drink. I can’t feel my legs.

Her apartment was never secured as a crime scene. A detective testified that the traffic through it after she was taken to hospital was one of the reasons he could not obtain a search warrant. What the state did have was the autopsy, and the autopsy did not describe an allergic reaction. Her cause of death was acute cocaine poisoning.

The investigation, the trial and the verdict

A Davidson County grand jury indicted Taylor in 2024; U.S. Marshals arrested him in Utah. His trial ran ten days in June 2026 and was carried gavel to gavel by Court TV. The jury deliberated for under two hours and convicted him on all four counts: second-degree murder in the death of Jade Benning, first-degree premeditated murder in the death of her unborn daughter, and two counts of first-degree felony murder.

Sentencing

On September 9, 2026 the judge ordered his two life sentences to run consecutively and added 22 years. The defence submitted 87 character letters at sentencing; Assistant District Attorney Jan Norman pointed out that not one of them mentioned Jade Benning or the baby. Taylor’s attorney, Letitia Quinones-Hollins, has said he will appeal.

In Tennessee, a life sentence is a 60-year term with a 51-year minimum before parole eligibility, and on first-degree murder it is the jury rather than the judge that fixes the punishment. Running the two life sentences consecutively rather than concurrently is what makes this sentence what it is.

Sources

• Office of the District Attorney General, Nashville-Davidson County (General Glenn R. Funk), “Former NFL Scout Found Guilty of Killing his Girlfriend and their Unborn Daughter,” da.nashville.gov, July 6, 2026 — the verdict on all four counts, the pink lemonade and the cocaine, the 911 call, the ten-day Court TV trial, the prosecution team, and the public-record courtroom photograph of Taylor.
• Trial testimony coverage, June 2026 — Nijaiha Jackson’s testimony, Jade’s words on the last phone call, the one-minute gap before the 911 call, the compromised scene and the search warrant that never issued.
• Sentencing-day coverage, September 9–10, 2026 — WKRN Nashville, WSMV 4 Nashville, FOX 17 Nashville (WZTV), People, the Associated Press wire and others.
• Photographs of Jade Benning provided by her family and widely republished for identification throughout coverage of this case, via FOX 17 Nashville (WZTV). All other imagery in the video is clearly credited illustrative stock. No news-broadcast footage was used, and no crime-scene or victim imagery appears.
• Tennessee sentencing mechanics and the survey of US fetal homicide statutes are presented as general legal background, not as case-specific findings.

A note on precision: sources differ on which college Taylor was working at when he was arrested — the Nashville DA’s release says the University of Utah, while several outlets say Utah State. This account says only that he had taken a college football staff job out west and was arrested in Utah.

Related reading

No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically yet — the conviction is only two months old. This is an honest, case-scoped Amazon search rather than a padded recommendation: Jade Benning / Nashville true crime on Amazon.

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