Salt Lake Tribune: Autopsy links Taser to Cardall's death

[Heidi]

Coroner cites being stunned near the heart as a key factor.

Updated: 11/19/2009 11:32:46 PM MST

A Taser that twice shocked Brian Cardall contributed to or caused heart irregularities in the 32-year-old man that led to his death on the side of a southern Utah highway in June, the Utah Medical Examiner's Office has ruled.

Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Erik Christensen cited "ventricular fibrillation following conducted energy weapon deployment during a manic episode with psychotic features" as Cardall's cause of death.

The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a copy of the autopsy report Thursday from the Cardalls' attorney. The family chose to release it after Washington County Attorney Brock Belnap said he will not prosecute the officer who deployed a Taser on Cardall. Belnap said Hurricane police Officer Ken Thompson legally used a Taser on Cardall as the man suffered a bipolar manic episode June 9.

The Cardall family disagrees with Belnap's decision, said Karra Porter, who is advising the Cardalls on their legal options.

Christensen's report states that prongs from a Taser a Hurricane police officer deployed struck Cardall over his heart. While Christensen acknowledged other factors could have contributed to Cardall's death, he pointed out factors that indicate a Taser electrocuted a naked, unarmed Cardall.

Read more

Investigative Summary (PDF)

[truedelphi]

1. Recently police in the rural townof ClearLake CA killed a mentally ill man

Because neighbors could hear him tearing up his apartment.

Why they didn't just station someone to watch over the sitaution and then taser him if and only if he left his abode I don't know?

The police in this nation have no shame regarding the over aggressiveness with which they strike out at the mentally ill. At least twice a year I read of people killed near here or back in the Bay Area - and that is quite a high number because I don't read the papers often.

I felt bad as I read the Clearlake story because it happened while his mom was taking a much need vacation away from her son. She'll probably go to her grave blaming herself for taking that break.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

2. The police can't stake out every potential problem.

When a citizen makes a complaint the police have a duty to investigate and attempt to resolve the situation.

[TheMadMonk]

3. His appartment, or a rental property?

Who will cover the damages? What if he busts through a common wall and guts a neighbours child? What if he takes it into his head to set the place on fire?

Mental health issues may explain a person's behaviour, however they never excuse that behaviour. Nor should they ever be a reason to not take whatever measures necessary to control/put an end to that behaviour when it threatens the wellbeing of others, be it physical, mental or financial.

Yes there are huge failings in the mental health care system, but "shoulda, coulda, woulda" has no relevance once the shit hits the fan. The situation must be dealt with as it is, not as it should be.

[truedelphi]

6. god help you if you ever have a child with autism.

or a nephew, niece or grandchild.

And with the way vaccines continue to have formaldehyde as replacement for mercury, and the way the public is persuaded to use formaldehyde
containing-items like Glade, Frebreeze and Lysols, et cetera, the chances of your having a close family member with this disease are relatively good.

[TheMadMonk]

8. Given up trying to pin it on Thimerserol, have we?

And bog help the rest of the world if you have such a child. Their illness/condition does not give them special rights to interfere negatively in the lives of others, nor you/their parents the right to allow them to do so.

Mental illlness/defect/(whatever you wish to call it) plus a tendency to violence is a pretty fair indicator of a ticking time bomb built with sweating explosives. We might get lucky and it never goes off, but I fail to see where compassion towards the rest of the world lies in making that bet.


Faced with a person in a "killing" rage, a copper's first responsibility is the safety of the general public, their second is their own (and by extesion their family's), and only then the "perp's". They are expected to make every reasonable effort to satisfy all three conditions, but the law (not to mention common sense) dictates that the third is only to be attempted if the first two conditions are satisfied.

[truedelphi]

9. No, that is not the point. Both mercury and Formaldehyde are particularly

Nasty to human beings - in fact, I am thinking that now that I know that Formaldehyde is in the damn vaccines, Prop 65 should force the vaccine manufacturers to have to label the vaccines as containing it. (That prop only applies to California.)

Either substance could afflict humans. On edit: But since they claimt hey are removing the mercury, i guess it would be rather silly to rant and rail against a substance they are supposedly no longer using.

You go on to say:

Faced with a person in a "killing" rage, a copper's first responsibility is the safety of the general public, their second is their own (and by extension their family's), and only then the "perp's". They are expected to make every reasonable effort to satisfy all three conditions, but the law (not to mention common sense) dictates that the third is only to be attempted if the first two conditions are satisfied.

If you were alive and aware back in the seventies, we as a community-based country had police who worked with mental health professionals and didn't get so trigger (or taser) happy that the mentally ill were shot as a simple and quick fix.

I have no idea why the situation has degraded so badly. And no explanation makes sense - good old Fire_Medic_Dave posts responses that do not read out at all like any paramedic I have ever known. How is it any easier to shoot someone? From my understanding of what goes on when a cop has fired a weapon, he or she spends the rest of the night doing paper work for the incident. Wouldn't it be better to just assign a police man or woman to watch the individual, until family can be notified?

Mental illness affects so many people - not just those who are autistic, but the growing numbers of families who have members with Alzheimers. Or brain damage from car accidents and war injuries. Those of us who blithely pound the keyboards could be afflicted tomorrow or next year or the next decade.

You may post that the police have the right to be killing as a first response any and all of those who "Go mental" but next year, you could be the one going mental.

[TheMadMonk]

10. The mercury was removed many years ago in several countries,...

...with absolutely zero effect on the rate of autism in those countries. Riddle me that sherlock.

Back in your bucolic seventies a good many of the mentally ill were still institutionalised. Furthermore, many more had, in the preceding decades, been subject to some rather nasty treatments that left them in no condition to go off the deep end. There were fewer serious incidents, simply because there were fewer seriously afflicted people to be involved in those incidents.

A new generation and with institutionalisation now an absolute last resort, the potential for incidents where the police are forced into impossible situations has risen enormously. Please note, I don't advocate wholesale institutionalisation, nor a return to those barbaric treatment methods. Chronic underfunding is a huge issue which must be addressed before things get better.

However, the police have to deal with the situation as it is, NOT as it SHOULD be. A copper does not shoot because he's "got better things to do", he shoots because he believes his life, or the lives of others are at risk. He IS there to monitor the situation until further help arrives, but he can not indefinitely back away from the person advancing on him with a knife or samurai sword, because that would put others at risk.

The drug crazed individual almost invariably chose to take the first steps down the path of adiction of their own free will. And the mentally ill individual was by the standards of psychiatry "sane" when he chose to forego his medication, because he didn't like the way it made him feel. They are ultimately responsible for their actions, even if at the time they are unable to control themselves.

In other cases, there are clear patterns of increasingly violent behaviour (sadly often in the autistic) that are not properly addressed until it's too late, either for the individual, or the victims of their violence. Some of it comes down to funding, and some to an unwillingness to infringe on their rights until circumstances force an intervention.

Individual rights are a wonderful thing, but not when others have to pay the price of allowing them.


As for your final sentence I am having a very hard time not swearing at you. EXACTLY WHERE DID I SAY THAT DEATH SHOULD BE A FIRST RESPONSE? Exactly how does "every reasonable effort" become shoot first in your lexicon, because it damned well isn't in mine.

Tasers may not be perfect. It is very probable that they have, in a very limited number of cases, directly or indirectily led to the death of the individual shot with them. And there is clear evidence that far too many officers do missuse them, almost certainly the same officers who used to be a little too eager with their battons. However, a recent independent study found that, since their introduction, there has been a measurable decline in the number of injuries and deaths (on both sides) caused during arrests and threat neutralisations.

[juno jones]

5. The first taser death I ever heard of

was that of a mentally ill man in Springfield IL back in 2001 or 2 when I was back visiting the fam.

He died in an isolation cell, unchecked for something like 12 or 24 hours even tho he was supposed to be given medication, etc. Similar situation, he was destroying (mostly his) property and wasn't a physical threat to humans.

Seems to becoming all the rage these days, huh? :shrug:

[truedelphi]

7. The first time I heard of the police & their over-aggression toward the mentally ill

Was a case probably ten years back in the affluent, very liberal town of Novato (Marin County, just fifteen miles or so north of San Francisco)

This mentally ill man, known to everyone in his community, freaked out at 2 Am one night. So the neighbor called the police.

The neighbor was worried about the mentally ill man's behavior and safety. What was the guy doing? He was standing on the roof of someone's care, twirling a BROOM.

The police came and shot him. And judging by the other posters' comments here in this new and deranged version of DU, the "conservative and hating of the mentally ill type of discussion board," good thing the cops shot him. I mean, who in their right mind would have wanted them to call up some local mentally disabled community activist (There are dozens of these people in Marin, and they would have gladly come out that night.)

(Oh and of course, this man had damaged the roof of someone's car, perhaps.)

So best that he was shot I guess. Again, who would want their heavily insured car to be torn up! If a single bullet could solve the problem.

But the neighbor who had called the police did not feel that way at all.

He was very torn up about the fact that his call resulted in the death of his neighbor. One reporter finally got him to open up and he said, "Hell, I own a gun. If I had known the cops were going to shoot him dead over his actions, I could have gotten my gun and killed him myself - it would have saved them the time and trouble." And for those whose sarcasm detectors do not work much these days, the neighbor was being sarcastic.

[juno jones]

11. Oh God.

Yeah, the Spfld one was eerily similar to that. It was a neighbor who called in, concerned. The deceased did this from time to time and was one of those people always in and out for stuff like this. This time he didn't get a ride to Zeller zone center (or whichever IL mental hospital was closest)like usual instead some cop (new, I think) decided to tase him, disregard his medical history which others were happy to provide, and lock him unobserved in a jail cell.

I remember hearing that the neighbor involved felt horrible for what happened.


It was like the tide changed then. It happened once and it was a rarity and caught everyone off guard. Now it tacitly approved and is as common as dirt.

PS: While I lived in Spfld 2 of my friends had scary encounters with the police there. One was pulled over for suspicion, when she wouldn't have sex with the cop, he jailed her for the night (but couldn't hold her past morning, and no charges filed). Another was raped by a IL state cop. She was a well-known activist and had a bunch of liberal stickers on the back of her car (like many of you do). Apparently he didn't give her the choice of jail. She never filed charges (Against a state cop in spfld? Wanna make yer life hell?)and her health declined from there. She died a few years ago. Nothing directly attributable to the rape, but after the event it was if she wasted away.

And the mental hospital isn't much better. I had a nother female friend raped there.

[TexasObserver]

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