Monday, September 29, 2008

Wrong Response, Thanks To Tasers

When your only tool is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail!

Police forces tend to see tasers as cure-alls. So, when this irrational man posed a menace (mostly to himself), the police tasered him, leading to the feared disaster:
Police fired a Taser at a naked Brooklyn man armed with only a fluorescent light tube yesterday, sending him falling to his death from a second-floor ledge after he went on a 40-minute rant.

...With police shouting for him to get down, Morales made his way to a ledge above a the gate.

"Walk down now! Move down!" the police can be heard shouting to him on video.

He then picked up the light tube and waved it in the air before jabbing cops who had climbed out of the windows above.

"When he was poking the cop, people were laughing," Johnson said.

He refused orders from the officers and continued his incoherent tirade.

Finally, one of the ESU cops on the street shot him with the Taser.

"He just fell face first," said witness Sean Brown. "People were screaming and yelling. It was wrong."

It was unclear what set off the episode, but, said Johnson, "once he started hitting the cop with that pole, that's when it turned serious."

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