ONTARIO, California – As her husband stalked around the back yard, upending chairs and screaming about demons, Nancy Schrock knew he was unraveling fast. She dialed the police.

“He needs to be in the hospital,” she told a 911 dispatcher. It was 10:24 p.m. on a Thursday in June 2012. “He’s really, really, really bad.”

Tom Schrock had struggled with depression and occasional drug problems throughout their 35-year marriage, and his manic episodes had grown more fierce since their oldest child died three years earlier of a heroin overdose. Police had visited the family’s ranch-style house east of Los Angeles more than a dozen times. Typically, Tom was taken to the hospital, medicated and sent home after 72 hours.

Not this time.

Three officers answered the call, categorized by the dispatcher as a disturbance involving an unarmed man with mental health issues. Nancy took them through the house to the back; Santiago Mota, a veteran cop, drew his Taser. As officers came out the back door, Tom strode toward them, arms at his side, hands closed. They ordered him to stop, but he kept coming, muttering, “Get out.”

Mota fired the Taser.

Tom buckled, then retreated into the yard. Mota followed, pressed the electric stun gun to Tom’s chest and fired again. The 57-year-old collapsed, gasping, unresponsive. He never regained consciousness.

“I called for help,” Nancy said. “I didn’t call for them to come and kill him.”

The San Bernardino County Coroner labeled the cause of Schrock’s death “multifactorial,” ruling Tom died from a lack of oxygen to the brain due to cardiac arrest following “law enforcement intervention.” First among the “contributing causes:” use of a Taser.

The Schrocks sued Ontario police and the weapon’s manufacturer, Taser International Inc. They contended the stun guns were inherently dangerous, and accused the department of failing to properly train officers on the risks of using the weapons on people with mental health problems. The city settled for $500,000. The case against Taser was dismissed in June; both sides declined to say whether there was a settlement.

As thousands of police forces across America have embraced Tasers, the outlines of the Schrock case have grown familiar: a Taser shot, an unintended death, a damage claim. But the episode’s nuances – a mentally ill victim, a complex death investigation, a debate over the weapon’s use – tell a deeper story.

Tom Schrock’s death is one tragedy in a larger constellation of fatalities involving Tasers explored by Reuters in a first-of-its-kind examination of deaths and lawsuits involving the stun guns.

Reuters documented 1,005 incidents in the United States in which people died after police stunned them with Tasers, nearly all since the early 2000s – the most thorough accounting to date of fatal encounters involving the paralyzing stun guns.

Many of the casualties are among society's vulnerable. A quarter of the people who died, like Schrock, were suffering from a mental health breakdown or neurological disorder. In nine of every 10 incidents, the deceased was unarmed. More than 100 of the fatal encounters began with a 911 call for help during a medical emergency.

It’s impossible to know precisely what role the Taser played in many of the deaths documented by Reuters. A review of more than 400 of the fatal encounters – those in which court documents provide a relatively detailed account of what happened – indicates Tasers were the only form of force allegedly used by police in about one in four of the cases. The rest involved both Tasers and other forms of force.

Most independent researchers who’ve studied the weapons agree deaths are rare when Tasers are used properly. But the probability of dying from a Taser shock in a police encounter may be incalculable, researchers say, citing a lack of official data on stun-gun use, the fact that deaths often have more than one cause, and other complexities.

No government agency tracks fatalities in police incidents where Tasers are used. Autopsies are not public in some states. And coroners and medical examiners use varying standards to assess a Taser’s role in a death. The language of their rulings ranges from detailed and rigorous to thin and opaque.

“I called for help. I didn’t call for them to come and kill him.”

Against that curtain of uncertainty, Taser International has insisted for years that its weapons are almost never to blame when someone dies after being stunned. Almost always, the company says, those deaths result from drug use, underlying physiological conditions such as heart problems, or other police force used along with the Taser.

The company asserts that only 24 people have ever died from Tasers – 18 from fatal head or neck injuries in falls caused by a Taser strike, and six from fires sparked by the weapon’s electrical arc. Not a single person, the manufacturer says, has died from the direct effects of the Taser’s powerful shock to the heart or body.

Official records suggest otherwise.

Reuters obtained autopsy findings for 712 of the 1,005 deaths it documented. In 153 of those cases, or more than a fifth, the Taser was cited as a cause or contributing factor in the death, typically as one of several elements triggering the fatality. Most of the other autopsies cited a combination of heart and medical conditions, drug use and various forms of trauma.

The deaths pose a challenge for U.S. law enforcement at a time when protests over police killings have spurred cities to seek safer ways to control combative subjects. The Taser – a weapon nearly universally embraced since the early 2000s as an alternative to firearms – is widely seen as crucial to safer policing. About 90 percent of America’s roughly 18,000 police agencies now issue Tasers.

Tasers fire two darts connected to the stun gun by thin wires. When the darts hit a target, a pulsed current triggers a paralyzing neuromuscular response that gives police several seconds to restrain the subject. The gun can also be pressed directly against the body – the “drive stun” mode – causing intense pain, but without the darts’ paralyzing effects.

Many officers have taken a Taser shock in training, and they attest to its agonizing power.

“The Taser caused my whole body to lock up, and the pain would compare to a whole-body charley horse,” Salt Lake County Deputy Sheriff Tiana Broos once testified. “I felt like I was going to suffocate.”

Independent studies have found that when used properly, Tasers lower the rate of injury incurred by both police and the people they confront. The company estimates its weapons have been deployed more than 3 million times in the field. Taser keeps its own log of deadly incidents involving its signature stun guns, which it declined to share.

The 1,005 deaths identified by Reuters total 44 percent more than the 700 reported by Amnesty International at the end of 2016, despite the news agency’s use of stricter criteria in determining which incidents to count.

Taser says these tallies give an exaggerated picture of the weapons’ hazards because they suggest Tasers caused all those deaths, when most involved other types of police force as well. The devices have saved tens of thousands of lives, the company says. All weapons carry risks, said Steve Tuttle, the company’s vice president for communications, but Tasers are “the safest force option available to law enforcement.”

Tuttle also said the autopsy results collected by Reuters are unreliable because they were not “peer reviewed” – a standard for studies published in medical journals, although not applicable in courts of law. The medical examiners and pathologists around the country who decided the official cause of death in those cases may not understand the weapons’ physiological effects, he said, and may be “over-listing” potential factors in their rulings to avoid being criticized for possible omissions.

“Ultimately, Taser is not responsible for educating every medical examiner on the subtleties of electrocution,” Tuttle said.









After Reuters explained its findings to Taser, the company sent an alert to law enforcement groups summarizing some of the central points of this series, describing them as “not new” and promising to provide “key resources” to repudiate the reports.

Taser International, which acquired the stun-gun technology in the 1990s, changed its name in April to Axon Enterprise Inc. The new name, the company said, reflects its expanding business mission, including police body cameras and software used to manage evidence.

MENTAL HEALTH AND TASERS

Taser won immense popularity for its devices through a singular marketing focus: Instead of resorting to lethal gunfire or potentially dangerous physical confrontations, it told police departments, they could control combative subjects with a paralyzing stun.

Yet as the cases explored by Reuters reveal, stun-gun encounters can turn deadly. Often, those killed include people struggling with mental illness, emotional breakdowns or seizure disorders.

Encounters with such people have become more frequent as cuts in government-funded mental health services have thrust police into the role of first responders for those in psychological crisis. One in every 100 police calls involves a person with a mental health disorder, according to research by the American Psychiatric Association. Too often, experts say, officers see Tasers as a go-to weapon in those circumstances.

“Cops have been turned into mental health workers on the street,” said Ken Wallentine, former chief of law enforcement for the Utah Attorney General, who advises police departments on use of force. “I fear that some police training and some police practices have allowed the crowding out of persuasion,” he said, “and the Taser has become the default tool.”

Under law, it is up to police departments, not the manufacturer, to mandate when cops should deploy stun guns; a handful of states, such as Connecticut, have codified general rules of use. Some federal courts have held that Tasers should only be used on actively aggressive subjects, a view being adopted by a growing number of departments. And the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, advises against using Tasers on “persons in medical/mental crisis.” But police policies vary widely.

Taser itself has sent mixed messages about using its weapons on the mentally ill, Reuters found in an examination of legal filings and of hundreds of pages of warnings and training materials issued by the company over the past 15 years.

When Tasers began gaining popularity with police in the early 2000s, the company touted the weapons as an effective and relatively safe way to control people suffering a mental health crisis or intoxicated by drugs or alcohol.

“We did see those as potential uses of the device,” Taser President Rick Smith said in a 2007 deposition.

In materials provided to police trainers in 2004, Taser said its stun gun was “becoming widely accepted as the premier tool” for police units that deal with “emotionally disturbed persons.”

In recent years, the company has been more cautionary. Taser issued revised training materials in 2013 that advised police to avoid shocking someone “who is actually or perceived to be mentally ill.”

But that guidance, offered on the 66th slide in a 231-slide “User Course” presentation, was characterized as a liability consideration – not a safety issue. The company’s official warnings to law enforcement make no mention of people with mental illness. Instead, they caution against using Tasers on people who exhibit “extreme agitation” and “bizarre behavior.”

For police on the street, figuring out who meets those criteria can be daunting, officers and police lawyers say.

Assessing someone’s mental state on the fly is “one of the most difficult things an officer has to do,” said Eric Carlson, a training and counseling officer at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Santiago Mota, the Ontario, California, police officer who fired the Taser against Schrock, said in a deposition he was unaware Schrock was mentally ill upon arriving at the family’s home. The police dispatcher had listed the call as a “5150 hold,” code for a forced detention for mental evaluation. Mota said he missed the alert.

“By the time I'm arriving, I don't – I don't hear ‘5150,’ ” Mota said. After being stunned, Schrock went into ventricular fibrillation, a condition marked by a wildly erratic heartbeat. He died seven days later. The coroner found he had an array of heart problems, some likely exacerbated by a period of methamphetamine use two decades earlier, when he was caught making the drug and sentenced to probation.

Schrock, a hospital technician for much of his working life, was a gentle father who frequently took his children on camping trips and hikes when they were younger, Nancy said. “I mean, that was the love of my life, the father of my kids, and my life will never be the same again,” she said.

The Ontario Police Department declined to discuss the case or make Mota available for an interview.

Taser spokesman Tuttle acknowledged concerns about using the company’s weapons on the mentally ill. “Yeah, there are at-risk groups, and that is why we identify them,” Tuttle told Reuters. The use of Tasers on people in mental health crises “certainly is a topic that’s out there.”