RCMP Watch

Petersfield, MB (Winnipeg Free Press) - Nine months after she alleges four RCMP officers held her down in a jail cell and Tasered her three times, this 17-year-old girl lifts the bottom of her cotton shorts, revealing pale scars on her thigh from where the weapon reportedly shocked her.

The teenager and her parents are in the midst of a complaint against the RCMP for what they allege was improper use last year of a stun gun by four members of the force’s Selkirk detachment.

The 130-pound teenager admits she was unruly and impaired last Nov. 3 after she was arrested for joyriding in her parents pick-up truck with four friends around Selkirk, after her parents reported the vehicle stolen earlier that night. However, she and her parents said they can’t understand why the police allegedly needed to shock her repeatedly with a stun gun to subdue her, especially once she was already in jail.

“It’s like an intense, sharp, vibrating pain. I’ve broken bones before but that’s was nothing compared to this… I thought I was going to die,” said the teen, Thursday afternoon, in her parents country home.

“There was no way I was going to stop screaming.”

The parents and the teen, who cannot be identified due to the youth’s previous experience under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, said they were prompted to speak out about the Taser incident after the death of 17-year-old Michael Langan this week.

The teen said the alleged tasering occurred last November after she started arguing with officers in a detachment interview room, and then things escalated after officers carried her struggling into a hallway and into a jail cell.

She admitted she’s not proud of what happened.

Calm until asked her reaction to Langan’s death, she burst into tears Thursday at her parent’s kitchen table.

“I just felt bad, you know, because I know how he felt,” she said.

The girl’s mother said she’s outraged police did not tell her about allegedly using a Taser on her then-16-year-old daughter after she collected the young woman the morning after her arrest and sought no medical attention for her.

“Two days later, she told me her legs were really sore, and I asked why,” said the woman, who said the girl developed skin infections on her legs after the alleged Taser shocks, and was prescribed antibiotics by her doctor.

She said her and her husband knew their daughter was in police custody after being telephoned by RCMP officers after the girl’s arrest.

“I left her in the care and control of the police thinking she was going to be safe,” said her mother, 44. The teen was no stranger to police custody, said the family, because she had previously been taken into custody before for public drunkeness and mischief.

The week before the alleged tasering, the family said the young woman had also been arrested for assaulting an RCMP officer in connection to another incident.

They said no charges were pressed in connection with their daughter’s illicit use of their pick-up truck last November, but the teenager did not have a valid driver’s license at the time she took the car and knows taking the truck was wrong.

The parents of the teen have pushed for answers since late November into why a Taser was used on their teen daughter, she said, but to no avail.

A Winnipeg lawyer for the family, Catherine Dunn, said the RCMP has indicated to her that no criminal charges will be pressed against any RCMP officers.

However, a letter from the RCMP to the family this month indicates an investigation into the matter is still ongoing.