Brampton man in struggle with police is hit by taser and dies

September 17 2008
By PAM DOUGLAS, The Brampton Guardian

BRAMPTON - A Brampton man died in hospital Wednesday morning, 12 hours after being hit by a Taser in a struggle with police in a Mississauga police station.

An autopsy is scheduled for Thursday to determine how Sean Reilly, 42, died.

Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) is investigating the incident. Reilly was arrested on a charge of assault with a weapon at a Mississauga home Tuesday and taken to 12 Division on Dixie Road at Dundas Street. At 5 p.m. he became involved in a struggle with Peel police officers who were attempting to put him into a jail cell.

He was stunned with a Taser and went into “medical distress”, according to SIU spokesperson John Yoannou. Reilly was taken to hospital and admitted. He died at 4:45 a.m. the next day. An autopsy is scheduled for Thursday.

The SIU has designated four subject officers and one witness officer.

In Peel, only supervisors are armed with Tasers. In 2006, Peel officers used Tasers 56 times, with no deaths reported.

Earlier this year, an inquest jury looking into the death of amateur boxer and Brampton resident Jerry Knight — who was hit by a Taser during a violent struggle in the lobby of a Mississauga motel in 2004 — recommended that Tasers be issued to all police officers. The coroner in that case concluded Knight’s death was not caused by the use of a Taser.

More recently, a Taser was used to subdue a double murder suspect who was attempting to kill himself in the parking lot of a McLaughlin Road strip plaza this past April. In that case, the SIU ruled that the use of the Taser saved Dwayne Palmer’s life. He is now facing two second-degree murder charges in the brutal stabbing deaths of Rahimullah Shahghasy, 53, and his wife Nazifa, 52.

However, the frequency of use of Tasers by RCMP officers and their affect has been discussed recently and is now the subject of two public inquiries in British Columbia, both probing the death of a Polish man at a Vancouver airport.