Minutes earlier, the 51-year-old man had asked an officer: "Are you gonna kill me?"
High on cocaine, Howard started the standoff by dancing barefoot on an SUV roof, barking and muttering gibberish on the late afternoon of April 19, 2013. Two dozen neighbors gawking at the bizarre spectacle laughed when Howard jumped off the Ford SUV to avoid an officer's stream of pepper spray, and they taunted police, urging them to use their stun guns.
Police said in a report on the incident that Howard had thrown "boulders" and charged at officers. But a 17-minute video taken by a resident and obtained by The Baltimore Sun shows that when officers approached Howard for the last time, he was standing still, holding a child's scooter. Officers fired two Tasers, shooting electrified darts connected by long wires into Howard's body...
...Anthony Howard's sister, Robbin, said that she and her family have been asking questions about his death but have gotten few answers. The family abandoned legal action against Montgomery County after police declined to turn over any videos they had obtained from neighbors who recorded the incident on their mobile devices. Two bystanders told The Sun that when police returned their devices, their videos had been erased...
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/investigations/bal-tasers-in-maryland-story.html
Video Report:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bal-shocking-force-tasers-in-maryland-20160318-premiumvideo.html
Bravo for The Baltimore Sun!
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How we did it
During a six-month investigation, The Baltimore Sun produced the first-ever analysis of Taser discharges in Maryland. With raw data obtained from Maryland Governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention, The Sun created a database of every Taser discharge on a individual from 2012 to 2014. That office has details on every Taser incident, but its online reports only summarize the aggregate data. To find people behind the data, The Sun requested more than 150 police reports that corresponded with the times, dates and locations of Taser incidents listed in the state's information. In addition to police, lawyers, government officials and law enforcement experts, reporters interviewed the people who had been stunned or, for fatal encounters since 2009, their family members. The Sun also obtained and reviewed several thousand pages of police records, 47 police department policies for Tasers, 10 autopsies and scientific research on the weapon.