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News :: Crime & Police |
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Escambia Deputy Suspended for "Wrongly Tasing" Woman |
Current rating: 0 |
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by Channel 3 |
19 Feb 2005
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This was lifted from TV 3 |
The Escambia Sheriff's Office suspended one of it's own for wrongly tasing a woman.
It's another incident in a string of complaints over police tasings.
This one was caught on Walmart surveillance tape.
It all started over a child abuse report.
The woman who was tased wanted to file one, but somehow her meeting with the officer took a turn for the worse.
Deputy Charles Dix tased Martha Bledsoe in the parking lot about a year ago this month.
That's where she wanted to meet an officer to make her child abuse report.
Deputy Dix responded to the call and Bledsoe says he had an "attitude" with her from the beginning about parking in the fire lane, so she was defensive when she talked to him.
Dix says he thought there were "discrepancies" in Bledsoe's allegations and he believed she was lying.
Bledsoe soon called 9-1-1 to ask if Dix was the officer they sent to answer her call.
Problems escalated when Dix asked Bledsoe to get off the phone and she refused.
She tried to walk away and Dix tased her four times, for half a minutes when she refused his commands to stop.
Dix arrested Bledsoe for disorderly conduct, but the charges were later dropped for lack of probable cause.
The Sheriff's Office recently wrapped up an internal affairs investigation into the incident.
Investigators determined Dix acted "inappropriately" when handling this case.
He was suspended for one week without pay and forced to give up another week's worth of leave time.
But the victim, Martha Bledsoe, has filed a civil suit against the deputy saying he tased her "for no reason at all."
The Sheriff's Office refused to comment on camera for this story saying the report speaks for itself.
The controversy over tasers has the attention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The national headquarters is holding a hearing in Pensacola tomorrow at the Bethel A-M-E church to discuss recent deaths linked to tasers and the call to ban their use until more independent safety tests are done. |
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