Pro 8 Exclusive: Police Chief defends use of taser's, despite incident
By
Ray Gomez
Story Created:
Sep 25, 2009
Story Updated:
Sep 28, 2009
The Laredo Police Chief is providing answers on the taser incident that happened Tuesday morning.
A man died moments after being tadsered by an officer.
The incident happened Monday morning on the 200 block of Martingale.
When police responded, they found 44-year-old, Richard Battistata had already broken a bedroom window of an apartment and was able to go in.
Officers tried to stop him, but they say Battistata got aggressive and they tasered him.
"When the officers responded to this they did the best they could based on the training they received, in terms of assessing the situation. We are waiting for all the details to be provided to us."
At this moment Internal Affairs is conducting an investigation on whether or not the three officers who responded to the scene made the right decision of using the taser.
Meanwhile Chief Maldonado says it's just a matter of when and how officers use a taser, "I don't think there’s ever been a correlation of the actual use of the taser to loss of life. There are other contributing factors."
It is still unknown if there were any contributing factors in this case.
Chief Maldonado says he still doesn't know how many times the man was tasered, and whether or not the man was already dead when first responders arrived.
"I do not know, but we do keep records. We do keep track and is my understanding he didn't just try to get into the residence, He was inside the residence.” But more questions than answers surrounds this case and even the Chief has questions of his own.
"There is a lot of questions that certainly the viewers have and there are questions that we have. That's why we are conducting investigation. We are very serious about this. This is not something we are taking lightly."
At this moment all three officers have been placed on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation.
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Curious said on Monday, Sep 28 at 2:49 PM
I wonder whether these things log their activity. I.e. someone gets tasered, a tamper-proof log should be written on the device to state how many times, voltage, duration, interval between hits etc. Hell the thing is pointing at the target, so they could even include a camera/microphone and solid state storage to record footage? At least make the use of these things a little more accountable...
29800442Can anyone said on Monday, Sep 28 at 4:51 PM
Can anyone answer to Curious? He/she does have a really good point.
29807427this just makes me sick said on Friday, Oct 2 at 6:34 PM
Oh, I guess it's all right knowing that cocaine was in the dead mans system? Minority Report a la deja vu.
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