Calif. Man Dies After Cops Use Stun Gun During A Traffic Stop

May 12, 2011
by Eyder Peralta, NPR

A routine traffic stop ended in the death of a 43-year-old California man. The Los Angeles Times reports that San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputies attempted to stop Allen Kephart, after they say he ran a stop sign. Cindy Bachman, a sheriff department spokeswoman, told the Times that Kephart drove to a gas station about a quarter of mile away, got out of the car and "became combative and uncooperative:"

"The deputy attempted to place him under arrest, at which time he was Tased," Bachman said. "He became unconscious, and medical aid was immediately provided, CPR."

Kephart was taken to a local hospital, where he was declared dead.

The San Bernardino Sun reports this was Kephart's first real run-in with police. His father, reports the Sun, is a 20-year member of the San Bernardino County sheriff's Rangers volunteer unit.

"They're not dealing with a criminal, a druggie, a gang banger. They were dealing with someone that was in the community for 43 years, that never ever had been arrested or had any problem with law enforcement," his father, Alfred Kephart, told the Sun.

Back in 2009, five men in the area died after being hit with stun guns. Inland News Today reports that led Taser International, a maker of stun guns, to issue an advisory that said aiming the device at a suspect's chest could cause an "adverse cardiac arrest."

Truth, Not Tasers, a website that keeps track of stun guns deaths in the United States, says 19 people have died in stun gun incidents in 2011. 65 people died in the U.S. last year, according to the site.

A 2008 study by Amnesty International found that in 90 percent of stun gun incidents, suspects were unarmed. In June of 2010, Amnesty International reported more than 400 people had died after being stun gunned by police.

The Los Angeles Times reports Kephart was Tased about eight times by two deputies.

Tasers Implicated in Excited Delirium Deaths

February 27, 2007
Laura Sullivan, NPR (National Public Radio)

The second in a two-part report

The medical diagnosis called excited delirium is the subject of intense debate among doctors, law-enforcement officers and civil libertarians. They don't even all agree on whether the condition exists. But to Senior Cpl. Herb Cotner of the Dallas Police Department, there's no question that it's real.

"This is when you have someone doing push-ups with two 150-pound officers on their back," Cotner says, describing how the condition can manifest itself.

Excited delirium is a term more medical examiners are using to explain why people — often high on drugs or alcohol — die suddenly while in police custody. Symptoms are said to include extreme agitation, aggressive, violent behavior and incoherence.

Cotner had to subdue several men. One man smashed through a plate-glass window, fell from a fence, broke his leg several times and still walked two blocks to fight with police.

"[I] had a guy that was handicapped, with a bad leg and a bad arm," Cotner said about another man. '[He] dragged us across a parking lot, and we had him half-controlled."

"These fights leave us exhausted," he adds. "There is no one thing that simply describes this. It's a totality of characteristics that you can't explain."

One minute, a person is fighting and screaming; the next minute, he's dead, Cotner says.

Cotner trains officers to give the person space and try to calm them — unless the person poses a danger to someone else. In those cases, a fight often results.

And in a growing number of cases, police officers end up reaching for their Tasers. That is where the debate over excited delirium becomes more complicated.

Medical Condition or Legal Cover?

Civil-liberties groups fear that the diagnosis is being used to cover up police abuse — and to protect companies like Taser International from lawsuits.

Taser International, the company that makes stun guns, says its product helps police deal with people suspected of having excited delirium. A company spokesman told NPR that Tasers could be the only way to subdue a person fast enough to get medical attention.

But according to civil-liberties groups and legal filings, Taser may have financial reasons to support — and even encourage — the use of the excited delirium diagnosis.

Take the case of Frederick Williams. On a grainy video, Williams is screaming, 'Don't kill me! I have a family to support. I've calmed down!" as several officers carry him into the Gwinnett County Detention Center in a suburb of Atlanta. One officer takes out his Taser and fires it directly onto Williams' chest.

The officer yells, "Relax! Stop resisting!" But the shock keeps jerking Williams' chest upward. As several officers hold Williams down, he is stunned six more times. A few minutes later, the officers realize Williams is not breathing. Williams died a few hours later.

Williams' family is now suing the county and Taser International. The company has made it clear in proceedings so far that it intends to argue Williams died of excited delirium — not because of the Taser or excessive force. The medical examiner could not determine the exact cause of death.

Williams, a deacon in his church and father of four, had no drugs or alcohol in his system.

Publicizing the Diagnosis

Excited delirium has helped Taser International in the past. In recent years, the company has successfully defended itself against at least eight lawsuits involving people who died in police custody, arguing that the cause of death was excited delirium, not the Taser.

Taser International spokesman Steve Tuttle acknowledges that each year, his company sends hundreds of pamphlets to medical examiners explaining how to detect excited delirium. Taser also holds seminars across the country, which hundreds of law-enforcement officials attend. But Tuttle says his company is only providing information that has been vetted by researchers.

"We're not telling departments [that] excited delirium is always the cause of death following a Taser application," Tuttle said. "We're simply pointing out the facts: that excited delirium is an issue out there, and they need to treat this as a medical emergency if they see these signs."

Taser is also reaching out to the medical community.

John Peters is president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a prominent consulting company in Henderson, Nev. His firm specializes in training law-enforcement officers, coroners, emergency-room physicians and others in the medical community about sudden death from excited delirium.

A Conflict of Interest?

Peters is also one of Taser International's star witnesses against claims that the weapon kills people. He and his staff were paid by Taser for a year and a half to instruct at the company's training academy.

Peters says that training law enforcement to embrace excited delirium does not affect his impartiality on the stand.

"Some people would say, 'Well, obviously you're on their side,'" Peters said. "But the Taser is just one piece of this. I'm not a Taser instructor. I don't hold stock in Taser. So we try to maintain a distance or separation."

But Eric Balaban, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, worries that the messages police receive about excited delirium may actually exacerbate confrontations with people in custody.

"If police officers are being trained about this condition known as excited delirium, and are being told the people suffering from it have superhuman strength, and [these people] are being treated as if they are somehow not human, it can lead officers to escalate situations," he said.

Balaban says the fear is not just that excited delirium may not exist, but that it is already being overused — in lawsuits and on the streets.

Death by Excited Delirium: Diagnosis or Coverup?

February 26, 2007
Laura Sullivan, NPR (National Public Radio)

The first of a two-part report

You may not have heard of it, but police departments and medical examiners are using a new term to explain why some people suddenly die in police custody. It's a controversial diagnosis called excited delirium. But the question for many civil liberties groups is, does it really exist?

The phenomenon can be witnessed in a grainy video shot in 2003 by a dashboard camera in a Cincinnati police car. In it, a patrol car pulls up quickly to the parking lot of a White Castle in Cincinnati. A 350-pound man is seen stumbling around, yelling.

The man is 41-year-old Nathaniel Jones, a father of two who worked in a group home. He argues with two officers. He seems confused; he can't keep his balance. The officers close in. The officers order Jones to get down but they can't seem to catch him. He throws his body at one of the officers. Out come the nightsticks.

They strike him about 40 times. Jones is on the ground when more officers arrive with nightsticks. Jones calls out for his mother. That's the last thing he says.

Jones stops moving. He dies a few minutes later.

The coroner found that Jones did not die from excessive police force but from a number of causes — such as heart failure, obesity, drug use and asphyxiation. He later told reporters that Jones' death could have been the result of something called excited delirium.

Medical Condition Not Recognized

Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami, describes the symptoms of the condition:

"Someone who's disproportionately large, extremely agitated, threatening violence, talking incoherently, tearing off clothes, and it takes four or five officers to get the attention of that individual and bring him out of harm's way — that's excited delirium."

Mash says the phenomenon came to light in the 1980s, when cocaine burst onto the scene. Most victims have cocaine or drugs in their systems. Jones had smoked cocaine and PCP. Mash says victims become irrational, their body temperatures rise so fast their organs fail, and then they suddenly die.

"It's definitely real," Mash says. "And while we don't know precisely what causes this, we do know it is the result of a neural chemical imbalance in the brain."

But nearly all reported cases of excited delirium involve people who are fighting with police. And that's extremely problematic, says Eric Balaban of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"I know of no reputable medical organization — certainly not the AMA [American Medical Association] or the APA [American Psychological Association] — that recognizes excited delirium as a medical or mental-health condition," Balaban says.

He's right. Excited delirium is not recognized by professional medical associations, and you won't find it listed in the chief psychiatric reference book.

Balaban charges that police officials are using the diagnosis "as a means of white-washing what may be excessive use of force and inappropriate use of control techniques by officers during an arrest."

The International Association of Chiefs of Police hasn't accepted the diagnosis, either, saying not enough information is known. But every year, excited delirium is showing up on more and more medical examiners' autopsy reports.

An Overdose of Adrenaline?

According to Dr. Vincent Di Maio, "What these people are dying of is an overdose of adrenaline."

Di Maio was until recently the chief medical examiner for Bexar County, Texas. Di Maio says that he saw three to five cases of excited delirium each year, and that there are probably several hundred cases nationwide.

He says the condition typically arises after officers have wrestled down an uncooperative suspect:

"They bind the feet, and every one stands back and they're panting. And then finally someone says, 'He's not breathing.'"

Di Maio says it is often the very act of resisting that sends people prone to excited delirium over the edge. If they were in a field, alone, running around hysterical, Di Maio says they might still have died. But he says fighting makes death all but certain. And because most people are in public places, not in fields, that means they're usually fighting with the police. Di Maio says civil liberties groups then wrongly blame the officers for the death.

"They buy into this mode that if somebody dies, somebody's got to be responsible," DiMaio says. "Of course, it can't be the person high on coke or meth."

But even with an extensive autopsy, there is no definitive way to prove someone died of excited delirium.

"But if you're talking about police abuse — beating him to death, or hog-tying — the answer is yeah, you can tell the difference," Di Maio says.

Either way, it doesn't matter, says Dawn Edwards of the Ella Baker Center, a police watchdog group in Oakland, Calif. If police take a person into custody, Edwards argues, they need to make sure the person stays alive — whatever the condition of the person's brain or body temperature or their agitated state.

"They want the victim to be looked at as the cause of his or her own death," she says. "The bottom line is that these people are dying at the hands of, or in the custody of, police officers."

Diagnosis Based on Behavior Alone

Several medical doctors interviewed by NPR said there is a way to calm someone down who has the symptoms that have come to be known as excited delirium. Doctors at the emergency room at the Vanderbilt University hospital in Nashville, Tenn., have tranquilized three people. Their heart rates and body temperatures were soaring. They woke up fine.

But that was in a hospital, with doctors and intravenous drugs. Police officers are not allowed to administer medicine. They have only their nightsticks, Tasers, pepper spray or their own bodies — which may make the situation worse.

Because excited delirium doesn't show up in an autopsy, it is the subject's behavior that determines the diagnosis. And if there aren't any witnesses, only the police can describe what happened.

Videos of excited delirium incidents are rare. And as officers made clear at the end of the tape of Nathaniel Jones' death, police are not always eager to have the cameras on.

In that video, as an ambulance crew straps Jones to a gurney, the officers standing in front of the patrol car ask whether anyone left their onboard video recording devices on.

"I know it's on. I left it on. I turned the mike off," an officer is heard saying.

The officer swears and rushes to his car. He shuts the video off and the tape goes dead. But even with a video, a medical examiner, a dozen witnesses and an autopsy, exactly how and why Nathaniel Jones died still seems to depend on whom you ask.