Taser

A 15-year-old died after he was Tasered by police following a traffic stop and half-mile foot chase that began just north of Detroit. Warren Deputy Police Commissioner Jere Green said the teen was Tasered while struggling with officers in an abandoned Detroit house. An autopsy is scheduled for today.

Re "Officer's use of Taser on 12-year-old investigated," March 2 This article mentions the use of Tasers on small children. But a 5-foot-7, 130-to 150-pound 12-year-old male, like the one involved in the Hawthorne incident, is not a small child. This student had already inflicted physical harm on adults trying to restrain him. The use of mace and rubber bullets is also not without hazards. So what other choice did the police officer have? The topic that should be debated is the practice of placing violent autistic students in regular classrooms.

The family of a 12-year-old autistic boy who was shot last year with a police stun gun at a Hawthorne middle school accused police officials on Monday of removing their son from school in handcuffs days after the incident and subjecting him to an interrogation in retaliation for a misconduct complaint the family had filed. The family's attorneys contacted The Times after reading the Hawthorne Police Department's version of the Sept. 23 incident in the newspaper this week.

Hawthorne police have launched a misconduct investigation of an officer who used a 50,000-volt stun gun on a violent autistic 12-year-old boy at one of the city's middle schools, authorities said. Such use of electroshock weapons by police on young students is rare, but high-profile incidents have sparked fierce debate around the country over when, if ever, Tasers should be used on children.

A man left paralyzed below the chest after he fell from the top of a jail bunk bed when a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy used a stun gun on him sued the Sheriff's Department on Tuesday, alleging that his civil rights had been violated. According to the federal lawsuit, Blake Dupree, 22, said he was standing on his bunk about four to seven feet above the concrete jail floor with his hands raised in a defensive posture when he was stunned with a Taser, which delivers a 50,000-volt shock.

Jack Cover, an aerospace scientist who invented the Taser stun gun -- a device used by thousands of law enforcement agencies to subdue unruly offenders with electrical shocks -- has died. He was 88. Cover had Alzheimer's disease and died of pneumonia Saturday at the Golden West Retirement Home in Mission Viejo, said his wife, Ginny. Trained as a nuclear physicist, Cover spent most of his career working in aerospace and defense industries.

The ACLU has asked the Orange County Sheriff's Department to restrict the use of Tasers in most cases, saying hundreds of people have died nationally after being shocked by the stun guns during encounters with police. The American Civil Liberties Union delivered a sharply worded 10-page letter to Sheriff Sandra Hutchens on Tuesday, urging her to limit the department's use of Tasers to incidents in which there is a threat of "death or serious bodily injury."

The city of San Jose will pay $70,000 to the family of a man who died after police used a Taser stun gun on him. Officers said 38-year-old Jose Rios defied repeated attempts to subdue him when they responded to a domestic dispute in November 2005, prompting them to strike him with batons and shock him with Tasers. Rios' family said officers continued stunning him even after he was subdued. He later was pronounced dead at a hospital. The coroner found that Rios died of a heart attack from a combination of the violent struggle, cocaine and the Taser.

New York police Lt. Michael Pigott turned 46 on Thursday, but before the sun rose, he slipped out of his home, drove to his former command in Brooklyn and fired a single bullet into his head, police said. Pigott, a respected 21-year veteran, was declared dead at a hospital. He had been tormented since Sept. 24, when his order to Taser a psychiatric patient led to the man's death, according to police officials and sources.