WASHINGTON — Recently discovered videos show the repeated use of a stun gun on a Virginia man who died in police custody.
The videos from the police car dashboard and the hospital surveillance cameras, obtained by MSNBC, shows the events of May 4, 2013, when South Boston, Virginia, police officers took Linwood Lambert with them after noise complaints at a Super 8 motel at about 5 a.m.
Three officers arrived at Lambert’s motel room and say he was hallucinating, reportedly telling them there were bodies buried in the ceiling.
They didn’t arrest Lambert; they handcuffed him and put him in a cruiser to take him to an emergency room for treatment. When they arrived at the hospital, Lambert kicked out a window of the car; then, when officer opened the door, Lambert burst through it and ran to the door of the ER, slamming himself into it. At that point, the officers begin user a Taser on him.
One officer says, “Every time you get up, I’m going to pop you.” At this point, Lambert tells the officers “I just did cocaine.”
Though the officers brought Lambert to the emergency room for medical attention, they then took him away, now cuffing his feet as well as his hands, arresting him and putting him back in the car. They used the Taser on him several times then as well because he wouldn’t sit up straight.
One officer was asked by a hospital worker whether the officers were bringing Lambert in for treatment. The response was, “We were; now he’s going to jail. … He’s bleeding like a hog; we thought he was crazy, and then he finally told us he was on cocaine.”
Taser International reports obtained by MSNBC say the weapons were discharged 20 times in roughly a half-hour. One of the officers used her Taser 10 times in a two-minute span.
Each discharge carries 50,000 volts. It’s not known exactly how many discharges actually hit Lambert.
Video from the squad car shows Lambert unconscious on the ride to the jail. When the car got there, they checked his pulse, performed CPR and called for help. They brought him back to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:23.
Lambert’s sister, Gwendolyn Smalls, calls what she saw on the video “a nightmare.”
Her lawyer, Tom Sweeney, calls it excessive force.
“The mere breaking of a door does not warrant the use of hundreds of thousands of volts being shocked into a person’s system on multiple occasions by multiple parties,” Sweeney told MSNBC.
Smalls is suing the department; a court order related to the suit forced the police to give her the videos.
The South Boston police’s rules say that Taser use “is no longer justified once the subject has been restrained,” MSNBC says.
The police didn’t comment to MSNBC. In Smalls’ suit, they point to the fact that Lambert had admitted to using cocaine and that “acute cocaine intoxication” was listed as the cause of death after an autopsy.
Lambert had an extensive criminal record, Sweeney acknowledges, though the police haven’t mentioned it in their response to the suit so far. Sweeney says Lambert’s record is irrelevant: “The police didn’t know that when they were tasing him,”
See a report from MSNBC:
The raw video:
