Family of man killed by Taser files federal civil rights lawsuit against county sheriff

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(02-24) 09:06 PST SAN JOSE -- The parents of a man who died after a confrontation at a San Jose hospital during which he struggled with Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies and was stunned with a Taser by a Campbell police officer have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

The death of 26-year-old Edwin Rodriguez in December 2008 at Valley Medical Center was the result of "excessive, unnecessary and inappropriate force" on someone suffering from paranoid delusions, said the suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose.

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The lawsuit said relatives had taken Edwin Rodriguez to the hospital for treatment of "psychotic symptoms" but that he had refused to go inside. Hospital staff told his family that sheriff's deputies had to be summoned, the suit said.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/24/BAVJ1C67NE.DTL

I live in San Jose, and the local police have had to deal with other recent brutality controversies. Other examples include:
- May 10, 2009: Daniel Pham, a mentally ill man accused of stabbing his brother. The police shot Pham to death despite family begging for the cops not to. Reports say that the cops shot Pham 12 times.
- In late October 2009, a video surfaced of four SJ police officers beating another Vietnamese-American person, San Jose State math student Phuong Ho, with batons even though Ho did not appear to resist arrest. That incident happened in early September; the cops involved were suspended, and yesterday the Santa Clara County DA dropped all resisting arrest charges against Ho for lack of evidence. The investigation of the police officers is pending.