By Holly Zachariah
Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A man who had apparently been inhaling a chemical from an aerosol can to get high caught fire yesterday after a Lancaster police officer shocked him with a stun gun.
Police were summoned to an area in front of the Kmart store on Memorial Drive just after 8 p.m. on a report that a man was yelling threats at people and darting into traffic.
When two officers arrived, one of them saw the aerosol can in Daniel Wood’s hand, and watched him inhale from it, according to a written police report of the incident. Then, Wood took off running and, once caught, kicked the officers and tried to bite them, Lancaster Police Chief David Bailey said.
That’s when one officer deployed his Taser, hitting Wood in the chest and the arm with the charged prongs.
“I then observed a flame ignite and I quickly shut off the Taser,” the officer identified only as H.W. Lanham wrote in his report. "(I) approached him and patted out the flame.”
Wood, a 31-year-old local homeless man, was treated at a hospital as a precaution and released, Bailey said. He was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and abusing harmful intoxicants and taken to the Fairfield County Jail.
The makers of stun guns warn that fires can happen, and Lancaster’s own written policy for the Tasers says that the devices shouldn’t be used when a flammable substance is evident.
The department officially issued the stun guns and put them into use for the first time on Sunday. The department used a $6,000 grant from the local Fraternal Order of Eagles to buy seven of the devices, and officers have been training for more than four months, the chief said.
“Clearly, this is not the way we’d hoped to get started,” Bailey said. “But I’m glad the suspect is OK, and this gives us an opportunity to review how we will do things from this point.”
He said there will be an internal review, but he said it appears his officers acted appropriately given Wood’s combative and threatening behavior.
“There was no recognition on the part of these officers that this would be the result,” Bailey said. “It wasn’t clear to the officers there was this threat. It wasn’t as if the suspect was doused in a chemical.”
CNN reported last month that a man in Australia who had apparently been huffing a chemical poured gasoline on himself as he charged police. An officer deployed a stun gun, and that man burst into flames. He was seriously injured.
Reports said police didn’t know if a lighter the man was carrying ignited the flame or if a spark from the stun gun was the source.
A man died in Texas in 2007 after police hit him with pepper spray and then jolted him with a stun gun. Authorities there also said at the time that that man was also carrying a lighter so the source of ignition couldn’t be determined.
Patrol officers with the Columbus Division of Police and troopers with the State Highway Patrol routinely carry stun guns. Spokesman for both agencies said officers go through extensive training before qualifying to carry the devices and that training includes warnings about the possibility of fire.
Copyright 2009 Columbus Dispatch