Inquest to rule on death of man shocked with Taser

Jen Lawson

Friday, Oct. 22, 2004 | 9:41 a.m.

A Clark County coroner's jury was to determine today if the actions of two Metro Police officers were justified, excusable or criminal in a struggle that officials said led to the death of a 47-year-old man in August.

Officers Patrick Denny and Mark Hutchinson used their batons and a Taser on Keith Tucker after he allegedly began acting violent and erratic.

Tucker died about an hour later. An autopsy showed he suffered cardiac arrest brought on by attempted restraint, and a medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. He also had cocaine and a muscle relaxant in his system, the coroner's office said.

Sheriff Bill Young criticized the findings of the coroner's office, saying that drugs and alcohol combined with a struggle can cause existing heart conditions to become fatal.

Tucker was the second man in Metro's jurisdiction to die after officers used a Taser to subdue him. In February, 26-year-old William Lomax died about 20 hours after an officer shocked him with a Taser during a struggle.

The officer was cleared of any wrongdoing, but jurors determined the Taser contributed to his death. The primary cause of Lomax's death was cardiac arrest during restraint, with PCP intoxication and bronchopneumonia as secondary causes.

After Lomax's death, Young said he planned to review the department's policy on Taser use to see if it could be improved in some way. Undersheriff Doug Gillespie said Wednesday that the policy is still being evaluated.

In the Tucker case, his roommate called police to their apartment near Flamingo and Sandhill roads because Tucker was destroying things and acting irrational.

Police said Tucker punched and kicked one of the two officers and resisted when the officers tried to handcuff him.

The officers hit Tucker with their batons, then shocked him with a Taser gun two to five times in an effort to calm him down, police said. He stopped breathing and later died at Desert Springs Hospital.

Attorney Cal Potter, representing Tucker's father, Sanford Tucker, said Keith Tucker had a broken arm and foot from a vehicle crash when the confrontation with police occurred.

"It's a situation in which it looks like (the officers) overreacted," Potter said.

Potter anticipates filing a civil lawsuit against Metro and Taser International, manufacturer of the Taser. He has retained an independent medical examiner to analyze the autopsy report, but he can't do any work on the case until after the inquest, when the report will be released.

Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, said the fact that the coroner's office doesn't release autopsy reports until after the inquest "makes it even more obvious that the coroner's inquest process is a complete charade."

Likewise, Potter said the proceeding is unfair because it is not adversarial -- there is no one aggressively representing the dead person, no one aggressively challenging the police officers' accounts of what happened.

But Metro Detective David Kallas, executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, the union for Metro Police, said, "From the association's perspective, we think it's very fair. You have jurors, six of them, chosen from a jury pool like any other jury. You have an unbiased hearing master."

The fact that the proceeding is not adversarial, with someone advocating on behalf of the person who died, is immaterial because a coroner's inquest is a fact-finding proceeding, Kallas said.

"There are other avenues available if someone is looking for an advocate," Kallas said, such as a civil lawsuit or a civil rights complaint with the Justice Department.

In April sources told the Sun that the Justice Department is looking into allegations of excessive force by local police officers.

The Justice Department's Division of Civil Rights had contacted at least four local attorneys and requested copies of civil cases filed against local police agencies, sources said. Justice Department officials did not return phone calls Thursday.

Eight people have died at the hands Metro Police this year through Thursday. Twelve were shot but survived.

The most recent Metro officer-involved death was Arcangelito Contreras, who was shot and killed last week after pointing a gun at police. That inquest is scheduled for November.

On Oct. 12 in North Las Vegas, an officer shot and killed Antonio Corona-Mendoza after he allegedly fired a gun in front of his house. The inquest is also scheduled for next month.

Since 1976, there have been 131 inquests in connection with deaths of citizens after confrontations with Clark County law enforcement officers.

Of those, 102 of the deaths involved Metro Police officers. Eighty-nine were found to be justifiable; six were excusable, meaning the officer made an understandable mistake; and two were suicides, meaning the person wanted police to kill them, according to coroner's records.

In one case, the jury ruled that the man died of cocaine toxicity, not as a result of the officers' actions. One death was deemed criminally negligent.

The officer ruled to be criminally negligent was later cleared by a Clark County grand jury, which refused to issue an indictment.