(Canadian Press) Langley, B.C. – A man is dead after he crashed through a second-storey window, naked and bleeding from a chest wound, and was hit with an RCMP Taser.
RCMP say they converged on a home in suburban Langley, B.C., Tuesday, following an armed robbery earlier in the day. A witness who saw a vehicle leaving the scene of the hold-up alerted police and followed the car to the home.
Cpl. Peter Thiessen said police heard a man and woman arguing inside the home, and then witnessed the man come through an upper-floor window and hit the ground.
With the gun used in the robbery nowhere in sight and the suspect trying to run inside the home despite a serious chest wound, police decided to use the Taser, Thiessen said.
He said the man was still alive when he was arrested but died en route to hospital.
Thiessen said a woman who was inside the home was arrested.
The RCMP Major Crimes Unit and the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team are investigating the incident with the oversight of Vancouver police.
The use of the shock weapons has been under scrutiny since Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski died after RCMP officers shocked him with a Taser at the Vancouver airport in October 2007.
A public inquiry into Dziekanski’s death is scheduled to get underway in November.
Last week, Vancouver police used a Taser on a 16-year-old mother who refused to hand her one-month-old baby over to social workers.
Police said they acted because of fears the “mentally distraught” mother might smother the little boy during the three-hour standoff.
If the taser had not been used this would probably never made the news. Why was it used on a bleeding individual the media asked? Great investigative journalism. Should have told them he would have been to slippery to handle with all that blood.
RCMP await autopsy on man they Tasered
Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, October 02, 2008
RCMP in Langley, B.C., are searching a house where a naked and wounded man died after being Tasered by RCMP officers after he crashed through a window following a bank robbery. An autopsy is expected to show the nature of the man’s injuries prior to being Tasered. The 49-year-old man was attempting to go back into a Langley house where his common-law partner waited, Cpl. Peter Thiessen told a news conference outside the home yesterday. “There was an unidentified female in (the house) who was a potential victim. We were potentially dealing with an armed, violent bank robber that we believed may have been in that home and could very well have been this individual. As well, there was an unaccounted-for firearm,” said Cpl. Thiessen when asked why officers used a Taser on a man who was already bleeding and injured from the glass.