Taylor Cole
Photo
Taylor's obituary
Our friend, Taylor Cole, was killed on Easter Sunday, April 5, while riding his motorcycle. It was a hit and run, and the police are investigating. As horrifying as the circumstances of his death are, the shocking way he died cannot approach the scale of the extraordinary life he lived.
Taylor was born in Fresno, CA, on September 6, 1980, to Sherrie and Lonnie Cole. In college, he balanced being an extreme sports athlete and a scholar, qualifying 23rd in the world in vert ramp rollerblading while completing his engineering degree. Taylor earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Riverside, and later returned to UCR for a master's degree in fluid mechanics. His years flying canopy formations inspired him to obtain an academic and scientific understanding of the forces that affect wings.
He began his career at Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona Division in 2003, working on electronic warfare systems. When Rear Admiral 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, 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 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. The mind stretching he learned at the think tank became the direct input to his days as an entrepreneur. Taylor grew up with a learning disability, undiagnosed until adulthood. Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) caused problems for Taylor. For example, it kept him from hearing things correctly during times of conflict. At those times, he said, you could tell him “red” and he would hear “black.” His neurologist at Loma Linda once asked him, “How did you pass Kindergarten?” Taylor expressed feelings of curiosity and relief upon learning of his diagnosis. Post diagnosis, knowing how many children with autism spectrum disorder had this same neurodivergent trait, he 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 technology becomes more and more pervasive, the open-ended creativity a human can apply to storytelling diminishes. He theorized that the prescriptive narratives found in books, movies, and games made it harder for kids and adults to express personal creativity. He believed we should allow the listener to create and apply their own creativity to a story. This conviction is what led him to develop the Minimally Defined Immersion technology, with early research showing promise not just for helping those with auditory processing disorder, but also forthose with autism, ADHD, and PTSD.
Taylor was also 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, launching from 8,800 feet after climbing in darkness from 3 a.m., landing within feet of his car.
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.
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: someone who set aside his own safety to care immensely for others. It was the definition Taylor carried with him.
Taylor Cole was never going to be kept in a box, even if it would have been safer. Maybe even especially if it would have been safer...
Taylor 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, and world champion skydivers.
He was 45 years old. He was a father who adored his fourteen-year-old daughter, Tessa. He was an avid dancer. He loved and lived to the absolute limit. As our friend, he was irresistible, even as some of us cautioned ourselves to not get too attached to a man who kept throwing himself out of airplanes and off mountain tops.
We are grieving up here in the San Bernardino mountains where he made his home. We send our deepest condolences to his family. He is survived by his daughter, Tessa Cole; mother, Sherrie Cole from Fresno; sisters, Lori Pucci and husband, Steve from Valencia, Stefani Cole Waters and husband, Patrick from Nashville, TN; niece and nephews, Cole Bertz, Katelyn and Andrew Pucci, Ozzy Waters. Many aunts, uncles, and cousins loved him.
We wanted more time with him.
We will never see his likeness again.
Send to someone
Want to stay updated?
Send flowers
Send flowers
Share this memorial website
Share with others
