NYPD reassigns cops involved in using stun gun on disturbed man who fell to his death in Brooklyn
Related article:
N.Y. man falls, dies after shot with TASER
By John Valenti and Rocco Parascandola
Newsday
NEW YORK — The decision to use a Taser on an emotionally disturbed naked man who wound up falling from a ledge to his death in Brooklyn was in apparent violation of department protocol, New York City Police Department officials said Thursday.
As a result, the lieutenant who ordered the use of the Taser has been placed on modified assignment, the officer who used the stun gun on the disturbed man has been assigned administrative duties, and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office is investigating the Wednesday afternoon incident in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Inman Morales, who held Emergency Services Unit officers on a fire escape at bay for at least 20 minutes, sometimes poking them with an eight-foot-long fluorescent light, was Tasered as he stood on top of a roll-down gate, about 10 feet off the ground, police said. Morales fell and landed on the sidewalk.
Video footage and still photographs show him laying on the ground, bleeding from his head wound.
“While officers had radioed for an inflatable bag as the incident unfolded, it had not yet arrived at the scene when Morales fell,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said in a prepared release. “None of the . . . officers on the scene were positioned to break his fall, nor did they devise a plan in advance to do so.”
Police said the order to use a Taser in such circumstances appears “to have violated guidelines,” reissued on June 4, 2008, which specifically state: “When possible, the CED [Conducted Energy Device] should not be used . . . in situations where the subject may fall from an elevated surface.”
The officers involved have not been identified by police.
On Wednesday, a police source, said the officer who used the stun gun did so because Morales posed a threat.
“He was swinging a large fluorescent light bulb at them,” the source said. “They were attempting to secure themselves on the fire escape to grab the guy and that’s when he swung the light at them.”
Morales has emotional problems, police said, and may not have been taking his medication. Others at the scene said Morales’ mother had worried about the side effects of the medication.
The altercation started at about 1:30 p.m. when Morales stepped out of his third-floor apartment at 491 Tompkins Ave. and onto the fire escape. He was naked, witnesses said, and yelling that “they were trying to kill him” and that he would kill everyone.
He climbed up one flight, started pulling belongings out of a fourth-floor apartment, then went back down.
Finally, with police officers on the fire escape above him and other officers on the street below, Morales stepped onto the top of the roll-down gate in front of an empty store.
Witnesses said police tried repeatedly to talk Morales to safety but that he would not listen and instead grabbed the light from under the container and started menacing officers with it, ignoring their orders.
“Walk down now!” police could be heard shouting to him on a video of the confrontation posted on the Internet.
The Rand Corp., a think tank, in June recommended that the NYPD expand its use of Tasers, first by testing them in a pilot program in which sergeants would carry them on their belts.
Taser use has traditionally been limited to the elite Emergency Services Unit, and the NYPD has described them as an effective way to diffuse volatile confrontations, particularly when dealing with the mentally ill. Critics, however, have called for their ban, citing a number of controversial deaths in cities around the country.
Copyright 2008 Newsday