A Lawrence County, Ohio teen ended up being tasered five times because he didn’t move fast enough to police demands, despite the fact that he was under no legal obligation to comply with the police’s instructions.
“We were riding along, and about 300-400 meters beyond the library, this Sheriff’s car suddenly pulled up alongside me and the Deputy rolled down his window and said ‘You guys shouldn’t be riding in the road.’ I responded ‘We have as much right to be in the road as you do.’”
Nevertheless, despite the fact that under Ohio law the two cyclists had a legal right to the road, Tony and Ryan both claim that the Deputy responded to Tony’s assertion of that right by yelling “‘Get off the f-king road’ several times.”
Both Tony and Ryan claim that the Deputy then attempted to force them off the road with his cruiser; As Ryan recalls:
“He was trying to force us off the road with his car, but there was nowhere for us to go. The shoulder was just gravel, and dropped off into a ditch.”
Both Tony and Ryan say that to keep from being run off the road, Tony quickly pulled ahead while Ryan braked and fell in behind the cruiser. Ryan says that once he was behind the cruiser, the Deputy slammed on his brakes, but Ryan evaded the imminent crash by riding around the cruiser. As Ryan cleared the cruiser, he says the Deputy opened his door and attempted to body-check him, but missed. Ryan caught up with Tony but, significantly, Tony says that Ryan didn’t tell him what had just happened; unaware of what had just transpired, Tony continued riding, with Ryan following behind him. Having failed to run the two cyclists off the road, the Deputy got back in his car, and raced ahead.
According to Tony, after the Deputy failed to force them off the road, he raced ahead to the cyclists, and as he caught up with them, hit his lights; he pulled to their right, in the parking lane, and with a profanity-laced tirade, yelled that the two cyclists were under arrest. Tony asked incredulously “What? What are you talking about?” Despite what he felt was a baffling outburst from the Deputy, Tony says that he wanted to pull over, but the Sheriff’s cruiser was between him and the shoulder of the road.
At this point, according to Ryan, the Deputy raced ahead 300 meters, swung his cruiser around sideways across the lane, partway into an auto sales lot, got out, and assumed a firing stance. Ryan claims that as the two cyclists approached, the Deputy yelled out, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”
With the Deputy in a shooting stance, the situation was getting dangerously out of control, so Tony says that he and Ryan rode up to the Deputy, intending to stop as he had ordered, “like ‘you got me,’” Tony says. They rolled to a stop. At that moment, Tony says, the Deputy fired.
Fortunately for Tony, the officer was holding a taser, and not a gun, as Tony at first believed. Only one of the taser’s electrodes hit Tony in the side; he was jolted, but not incapacitated, and he grabbed at it, yanking it out. Ryan was behind Tony now, out of taser range, watching in mounting terror as the incident unfolded.
By now, Tony says he was doing his best to defuse a situation that was rapidly spiraling out of control, but as he explains, the Deputy just kept making the situation worse. Tony says that after the taser had failed to have its desired effect, the Deputy pulled out his telescoping baton, and began swinging at Tony. However, he wasn’t having any more luck with his baton than he did with the taser; Tony says the baton failed to open fully, so the Deputy kept flailing away at Tony while trying to grab him and simultaneously attempting to hold up his pants-which were threatening to drop to the ground with each swing. The scene was both comical and deadly serious.
Tony then tried to defend himself by placing his bike between the police officer and himself to stop being beaten. He was afraid to get on the ground because he felt the police officer would beat him to death.
And then things went from bad to worse. Sometime during the altercation the Chesapeake, Ohio police showed up, and as Tony and the Deputy struggled, Tony was tased again, this time, by the Chesapeake police. According to the Deputy’s report, the tasing occurred as “Patrick lunged at me,” while according to Tony and Ryan, the second tasing occurred as Tony was resisting the Deputy’s attempts to beat him. Unlike the first tasing, however, this time, the taser connected; as Tony tells it, “I shoot up on my toes like a ballerina, then fall over like a log.” He landed on his right elbow, and hit his head hard enough to crack his helmet. “If I hadn’t been wearing my helmet,” Tony notes, “I would have cracked my head open.”
Ryan says that at this point, with Tony now laying on the ground, the officer tased Tony a third time. QIn notes he made shortly after the incident, Ryan says that Tony was tased a total of five times by Chesapeake Police officers; Tony says we was tased “repeatedly.” The Deputy’s report states that:
“He went to the ground and we kept giving him commands to stay down and he tried to get up and he was Tazed for the second time. He finally became compliant and he was handcuffed.”
If you’ve ever been tazed before, you know that your movements are uncontrollable after being hit. It can take up to several minutes for your body to quit spasming and for you to recover and be able to comply with orders from the police.
Meanwhile, Ryan had been waiting quietly nearby, watching the entire surreal scene play out before him; now, as the officers were tasing and cuffing Tony, Ryan tried to call his mother to let her know what was going on. As he was making the call, somebody shouted “Watch out for the other guy!” Taking heed of that warning, one officer kicked the phone out of Ryan’s hand, just as he connected with his mother; the phone went flying, and shattered when it hit the pavement. The officer then slammed Ryan face-first to the ground and handcuffed him.
Yes, Ryan was really a threat. He stood there the entire time and never approached the police. He did not attempt to intervene and help Tony. Only when he tried to make a phone call did the police become violent towards him.
The deputy claimed that Tony and Ryan were impeding him from a burglary, yet he had the time to stop and harass the two boys, beat and taser them, and pull up around them and stop them. If he could get around the boys to stop them, then why did he claim that he was being impeded.
…in Ohio, cyclists cannot be in violation of the impeding traffic statute if they are traveling as fast as they reasonably can. This principle was first established in a 2001 Ohio case called Trotwood v. Selz, and was subsequently codified into Ohio law in 2006, with the addition of a provision that:
“The [judge or jury], in determining whether the vehicle was being operated at an unreasonably slow speed, shall consider the capabilities of the vehicle and its operator.”
Thus, by the time the Deputy decided to stop Tony and Ryan for impeding traffic, it had been well-established in Ohio that cyclists who are traveling at a reasonable speed cannot be cited for impeding traffic. Although the Deputy would later refer to Trotwood v. Selz during his testimony, indicating that he had finally been brought up to speed on Ohio law-by a prosecutor, in all likelihood-it was apparent on the day of the arrests that the Deputy was completely unfamiliar with the law as it applies to bicycles, and in fact, he admitted this in his later testimony…
The charges were eventually dropped, but it remains a fact that throughout the entire incident, the deputy did not know the law as it pertained to cyclists on the road. He didn’t even know what the vehicular speed limit within city limits were. He spent more than 30 minutes looking in the code book to find something to charge the boys with. The deputy is the one that violated the law, never having the authority to pull the cyclists over in the first place. What this boils down to is a cop who is in a hurry to get somewhere and got pissed off that two kids were in his way. It’s an abuse of power by an ignoramus who should no longer have a job.
