The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
9:04 a.m. Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.
The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.
"All of it's just unreal to me. I was scared to death," Wells said in an interview with the AJC. "He kept tasing me and tasing me. My fingernails are still burned. My leg, back and my butt had a long scar on it for days."
The officer in question is Ryan Smith of the Lumpkin Police Department. Smith was called to back up an officer from the Richland Police Department because the sheriff's office in the county, Stewart, had no deputies to send.
Smith resigned as a result of the incident. The other officer involved, Tim Murphy of Richland PD, was fired for using pepper spray while trying to arrest Wells.
Wells is considering filing a lawsuit, according to her attorney,.
The details of the altercation between Wells and the officers have been fodder discussions in the two towns, which are only 10 miles apart. Some have speculated there was a racial component to the altercation between Wells and the policemen; Wells is black and the officers are white.
Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones, who came to the house seconds after the last electric shock was administered, suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black.
“I don’t think they would have done a white female like that,” said Jones, who is black. “If they had, it wouldn’t have been any doubt about whether they need to be terminated.”
Much of what happened in front of Wells' house was recorded by the camera on the dash of Smith's patrol car. The AJC obtained a copy of the video.
Wells, hidden from camera view by the open door of the Richland patrol car, can be heard pleading, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!”
“Get in the car. Get in the car. You’re going to get it again,” Smith answered.
Almost immediately there is another clicking as the Taser is discharged again and Wells screams.
"Don't do it! Don't do it!" Wells pleads again.
Smith, who quit eight days after the incident, remains unrepentant.
"I did what I had to do to take control of the situation," Smith told the AJC about his decision to repeatedly discharge his Taser.
Yet his former boss, Lumpkin Police Chief Steven Ogle, was shocked when he saw the video.
"I couldn’t believe it,” Ogle said. “You don’t use it [a Taser] for punitive reasons, to prod someone. It was evident it was an improper use of force. He was an excellent officer other than that incident."
Smith resigned just as Ogle started the process to fire him, the chief said. Smith now works for the Chattahoochee County Sheriff's office.
And on April 28, the Richland Police Department fired Murphy, the officer who first arrived at Wells' home. Murphy declined to comment saying he had been told there was an open investigation.
Some of the details contained in police department records conflict with those provided in interviews. And only the end of the encounter between Wells and the officers is captured on video.
But all agree that the struggle between Wells, 57, and Murphy, 52, started because she would not tell him the name of a friend who was at her house in Richland, 35 miles southeast of Columbus, when Murphy arrived around 9:30 p.m. on April 26.
Wells, who teaches in Columbus, said she had called to report a prowler. Murphy wrote in his police report that he was dispatched to check out a report of an “unwanted guest.”
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tags: police brutality, racism
image source: 206 Zulu
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