Home

  • Home
    • » e-Newsletters

Stun gun video makes national news

Healthcare Security Weekly, August 20, 2007

A confrontation between a hospital secuirty guard who fired a stun gun and a defiant father attempting to take his newborn daughter from the hospital made national headlines last week.

The incident, which took place at Houston's Woman's Hospital of Texas April 13, was captured on videotape-video that the father, William Lewis, gave to the Associated Press (AP). Lewis now tells the AP that his baby girl suffers from a head trauma because she was dropped.

The guard fired the Taser at Lewis, sending both father and child to the floor. In a statement to the AP, the hospital said Lewis was hostile and uncooperative to staff members who were trying to find out his relationship to the baby when they saw him trying to leave the facility. Elevators would not move because a wristband sensor on the
baby shut them off, as the father was leaving without permission.

"I've got to wonder what kind of moron would Tase an adult holding a baby," the AP quoted George Kirkham, a fomer police officer and criminologist at Florida State University. "It doesn't take rocket science to realize the baby is going to fall." Kirkham said the Taser is a legitimate law-enforcement tool, which should be used only to protect oneself or another person from "imminent agression and physical harm. They're overused now," he told the AP.

Most Popular