Police Release Video, Answer Questions In Taser Death

Thursday, May 31st 2007, 7:40 pm

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ Police released a grainy surveillance video Thursday showing officers struggling on the ground with a handcuffed woman who later died after she was stunned by a Taser.

Police Chief Bill Citty said two officers were acting appropriately when they used the Taser against the neck of Milisha Thompson. Citty said Thompson _ whom he described as 6 feet tall and weighing 260 pounds _ was being combative, even though she was in handcuffs, and use of the weapon was, therefore, in order.

The video does not clearly show officers wielding the Taser against the woman, an action that her estate's attorney, Mike Gassaway, has called using ``excessive force.''

As they were struggling with the handcuffed woman, officers tried to stun her five separate times with the Taser, Citty said. The weapon did not contact her skin on three of the attempts, so she was actually stunned twice, both times in the neck.

Thompson, 35, calmed down after the first time she was stunned, Citty said, then again became combative, causing officers to stun her the second time. Thompson still was breathing at that point, he said, and was put on her side before officers noticed she had stopped breathing.

Citty said officers then called an ambulance and tried to perform CPR on Thompson, but she died. Her cause of death is still under investigation.

``From what I know to this point, I don't see anything right now that the officers did as far as use of the Taser that would violate departmental policy,'' Citty said.

``The video really doesn't tell me anything, other than her actions. You can see what she did, her behavior, but I can't see the detail of what the officers did.''

He said there is nothing in the video that is inconsistent with the description of the event he was given by the officers, Edward Grimes and Rey Vasquez. Both remain on paid administrative leave.

The incident happened on May 19 outside the City Rescue Mission, where Thompson was living. The two officers _ which Citty said were the only ones available in that part of town, as others were involved with other calls _ went to the mission to investigate a possible drug crime.

Thompson was not involved in the report of the possible crime, but Citty said she became disruptive when officers arrived, at one point tearing an officer's uniform before she was handcuffed. The video shows Thompson twice running across the street, toward where the officers were attempting to deal with the original call.

Gassaway said that Thompson was not attacking anyone and merely was asking for help from the officers, and that after she had been handcuffed, she posed little threat to police. He theorized that officers used their Taser to ``show off to the crowd or to scare the crowd, or because they were mad at her.''

He said it was ``a situation of overreaction by the police being in an area where maybe they felt like they were in over their heads.''

Thompson's husband, Marvell Thompson, told The Oklahoman that he thought his wife might have been having a schizophrenic episode when the incident happened.

Milisha Thompson's family has filed a $1.5 million tort claim against Oklahoma City, saying in the claim that the incident involved ``excessive force, assault and battery with a deadly or dangerous weapon, wrongful death resulting from acts of police officers and failure to train, improper supervision, defective policies and procedures, and condonation of past misuse of tasers on citizens of Oklahoma City.''

The state Medical Examiner's officer has not determined Thompson's official cause of death.

Taser stun guns shoot 50,000 volts of electricity into people, temporarily disabling them. Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taser International _ the weapon's manufacturer _ said that about 11,000 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. use the weapon.

Citty said Thompson is the fourth person to have died after being subjected to a Taser by Oklahoma City police since the department began using the weapon in 1991.