Taser Death: Daniel Mingo (Mobile, AL)

Police continue to kill people with taser guns on a weekly basis. Another six people were killed in January 2010. The 65th person involved in taser-related killing since last year is 25-year old Daniel Mingo.

Mingo, died Jan. 28, exactly one week after collapsing, following his arrest by Mobile police. The police say that they pulled him over for a traffic violation. This innocent young man had his life ended by the police during that traffic stop in Mobile, AL.

According to a lawsuit filed against the city of Mobile and the Mobile Police Department, Mingo suffered a broken nose, blunt force trauma to his head and neck and sustained several cardiac arrests.

Unidentified arresting officers called emergency medical personnel to the scene only after Mingo -- as he sat in the back of a patrol car -- began "screaming and growling like a dog" and collapsed.

They were worried about his mental state, the attorney said.

Police beat Mingo during the incident and shocked him with a Taser, the lawsuit claims, and ultimately those injuries caused him to become "brain dead," Mingo family attorney Chase Dearman has said.

Mingo died after being taken off life support.

"Officers observed Mr. Mingo swerving. Actually the vehicle ran off the shoulder of the road. At that point the officer initiated a traffic stop. Once the officer got out of the patrol vehicle he headed toward Mr. Mingo's vehicle and he noticed Mr. Mingo was putting something in his mouth and didn't know what it was," Officer Ronald Wallace said.

Officers said when they asked Mingo to get out of the car, he ran away.

"At that point the officer pursued him and saw Mr. Mingo shedding his clothing and actually saw something fall from Mr. Mingo's pocket of his jacket that he shed off his body. We did recover some ecstasy pills in a bottle," Wallace added.

When he resisted arrest, he was shocked once by an unidentified officer with the Taser, according to police.

The lawsuit claims Mingo was beaten, stripped of his clothing and shocked multiple times, then dragged through gravel and glass.

At the hospital, nurses spent more than two hours removing glass, gravel and other debris from open wounds, according to the lawsuit, and Mingo suffered from severe brain swelling.

The police are working to drag Mingo's memory into the dirt. While Mingo was in a coma the police were busy filing charges against him that included driving under the influence, possession of Ecstasy, failure to obey a police officer, resisting arrest and third-degree trespassing.

According to the lawsuit, Mingo wasn't in possession of illegal drugs, and "had committed no crime other than a possible alleged traffic violation."

People living nearby said the commotion carried over to a home on Carlton Acres West. Police said they found Mingo hiding in a shed.

"I seen him come out and when they came out there was no excessive force being used. It seemed to me like he was going in convulsions, from one side to the other," said a witness who didn't want to be identified. "He was still like really incoherent but he was hard to restrain he was excessively moving around."

Dearman said tests at the hospital immediately after the incident confirmed that Mingo had no drugs or alcohol in his body. The cause of death was respiratory failure, he said.

Mingo had "nonviolent mental disabilities" and police were told about those disabilities by his mother - who called police dispatch - and a person in his car, according to the lawsuit.

The mother of Daniel Mingo said she tried to warn police that her son was afraid of them. One day after 25 year old Daniel Mingo was taken off of life support, Cynthia Mingo talked in the following video about her son and the incident with Mobile Police that is now the subject of a lawsuit against the city and police department.



WKRG.com News

Dearman said he had learning disabilities and suffered from paranoia.

After being stopped, Mingo ran away because he was "fearing for his life," the lawsuit states.

Officers who eventually caught Mingo had "harassed and threatened" him in the past for refusing to become a drug informant, according to the lawsuit.

It appears that the issue of taser torture that this blog documented in 2009 is continuing to plague our nation in 2010. What say u?