The Daily Background

This week has not been a good one for Taser International Inc. First, in a clearly inappropriate move, Florida police officers taser a student for nobody’s quite sure what at a John Kerry Q&A at the University of Florida.

Now get this: another police department in Florida is getting slapped with a lawsuit after it tasered a 56 year old wheelchair bound woman to death.

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

“One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.
[…]
A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield’s death a homicide.

The police department, which admitted that it tasered the delusional woman (who happens to have been African American) for an excess of two minutes, defended its action by saying she was armed with a hammer and two knives.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog