Speaker 1: Previously on Taser Incorporated. So you see this pig go
Speaker 1: into a sisterly, were you surprised?
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, that's not supposed to happen. They said, that's
Speaker 2: not supposed to happen, and they just kind of chuckled
Speaker 2: and said, no, no, that happens. Okay, why don't we
Speaker 2: know about it?
Speaker 3: It kind of just matter of fact. It looked at
Speaker 3: me like, oh no, he's not on drugs. It's a taser.
Speaker 3: Taser caused this.
Speaker 2: According to police, Masters wouldn't cooperate and the officer stunned
Speaker 2: him with a taser.
Speaker 3: He resisted arrest.
Speaker 1: What we're told is that police pulled over the driver
Speaker 1: because of an outstanding warrant.
Speaker 3: That's when all the questions really started. For me.
Speaker 4: I can't I can't explain how how my brain is
Speaker 4: fucking works now. I mean, it's just like every day
Speaker 4: he is a new challenge in it. I still figure.
Speaker 1: Rice Masters doesn't like to talk about what happened to him.
Speaker 1: It's too painful. So the handful of times we've talked
Speaker 1: about it since I met him ten years ago, this
Speaker 1: is how we do it, driving around back roads on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of Kansas City, driving helps him think.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna get up a little gas in this because
Speaker 5: I don't know how.
Speaker 6: Good the.
Speaker 1: Sun's going down and the Missouri sky seems pink forever.
Speaker 1: Rice is in his late twenties, now a grown up.
Speaker 1: His injury forced him to find a new road. What
Speaker 1: do you really want people to know about you? And
Speaker 1: who who Bryce Masters was before all this happened.
Speaker 5: I mean, I was just a kid. I was a good,
Speaker 5: hearty kid. I I was actually an anti bully. Like
Speaker 5: I'm a good guy. I love my family and I'm good.
Speaker 5: I'm good to people. I'm even even random people. You know,
Speaker 5: if if I see someone at the grocery store who
Speaker 5: needs a couple of bucks for their for their bread.
Speaker 4: Or you know, all, hey, I got it.
Speaker 5: You know, just that part of me has never changed,
Speaker 5: but that there's so many things about me, you know
Speaker 5: that I just wasn't me before, Like I was never
Speaker 5: a truly angry person and that and sometimes I can
Speaker 5: be really angry. It's hard to deal with that because
Speaker 5: that's not who I actually am, but it's it's part
Speaker 5: of who I become, and not because I wanted it
Speaker 5: to be. But because of this this injury that you
Speaker 5: screwed my life up.
Speaker 1: This is absolute. Season one, Taser incorporated a story about
Speaker 1: unchecked power. I'm Nick Beredini. Episode four, that's capture Bryce's
Speaker 1: Masters lay still in his hospital bed when his eyes
Speaker 1: broke free and started to scan the room. He doesn't
Speaker 1: remember any of those first moments, but his parents do.
Speaker 1: Mad Stacy Masters waited for three exhausting days for any
Speaker 1: sign that their son would live.
Speaker 7: We're coming through the door and I'm like, Matt, I
Speaker 7: think he's awake. And that's when he heard my voice
Speaker 7: and he he recognized us.
Speaker 3: When he finally woke up, he panicked.
Speaker 7: He heard my voice and he like kind of lunged forward.
Speaker 1: Nurses had to tie Bryce's arms to the bed after
Speaker 1: he tried to rip out the breathing tube stuck down
Speaker 1: his throat. He was bewildered, like he was trying to escape.
Speaker 3: They told us like, look, this is the hardest part
Speaker 3: because he needs to breathe on his own without the machine.
Speaker 3: But stay innovated for thirty minutes and you're gonna have
Speaker 3: to talk him through that. And he was just like
Speaker 3: he kept trying to pull the tube out of his throat,
Speaker 3: and I remember just big tears running down his face.
Speaker 1: Finally, nurses pulled out the breathing tube. Bryce was in
Speaker 1: a lot of pain. He was confused, but he was
Speaker 1: back from the dead.
Speaker 3: He didn't have a very good memory, Like we would
Speaker 3: tell him the story, I mean twenty minutes thirty minutes later,
Speaker 3: Why am I here? What the fuck happened to me?
Speaker 3: I mean like we just told you. Don't you remember
Speaker 3: no what you know? He didn't remember anything, and like,
Speaker 3: why why am I here? What happened? And it was like,
Speaker 3: you know, hey, this is what happened. You got stopped
Speaker 3: by a cop and you got taste. And he's like
Speaker 3: look at you, like what, Like, what the fuck are
Speaker 3: you talking about?
Speaker 1: Bryce's face was swollen. Doctors suspected his jaw had been
Speaker 1: dislocated and popped back into place.
Speaker 3: He had a big contusion on his chin, and I
Speaker 3: remember him picking up the mirror and he's like, what
Speaker 3: the fuck happened to my face? You know? And we
Speaker 3: were like, yeah, that's that what happened when the cop
Speaker 3: did this. And he's like what, He's like, what did
Speaker 3: I do? You know? And we're like we don't know,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't know. We don't know what happened.
Speaker 1: Bryce kept pressing his tongue against his lips. He said
Speaker 1: it felt raw, his teeth felt crushed. Stacy and Matt
Speaker 1: moved in for a closer look.
Speaker 3: And he's like spitting it out, and we're like looking
Speaker 3: at it, and we're like, what is that?
Speaker 1: One by one he started to spit pieces of his
Speaker 1: teeth into Stacy's hand. At least three were sheared in
Speaker 1: half and several others badly chipped, and Stacy were so
Speaker 1: wrapped up in Bryce's coma those first three days that
Speaker 1: they hadn't focused on the details of why he was
Speaker 1: in a coma, But when Bryce started to spit out
Speaker 1: pieces of his teeth, they grabbed their attention. Why was
Speaker 1: he tased? What happened to his teeth?
Speaker 3: That was just a whole nother revelation, Like this is
Speaker 3: way more fucked up than we thought.
Speaker 1: It turns out the FBI was interested too. Within hours
Speaker 1: of the incident, agents started investigating whether the cop who
Speaker 1: pulled Bryce over and tasered him violated his civil rights,
Speaker 1: and soon after Bryce woke up from his coma, they
Speaker 1: came to the hospital to see him.
Speaker 7: But I'm thinking, you know, we're kind of in the
Speaker 7: middle of something right now, maybe this can wait a
Speaker 7: couple of days, but they wouldn't wait. They were like,
Speaker 7: we understand, but we still want to talk right now.
Speaker 1: Over the course of several visits, the FBI agents took
Speaker 1: pictures of Bryce's messed up face, his broken teeth, and
Speaker 1: the two little red bumps that showed where he'd been
Speaker 1: tasered on his chest. The agents knew exactly where to
Speaker 1: look for Bryce's injuries, to the point that Matt and
Speaker 1: Stacy got the sense that the FBI knew something they didn't,
Speaker 1: and it was true. The agents told them they knew
Speaker 1: what happened that day. There was video of the entire incident.
Speaker 1: Matt and Stacy wanted to know when could they see it?
Speaker 1: What did Runnels do to Bryce? But also had Bryce
Speaker 1: done something to Runnels? Not even Bryce could answer that question.
Speaker 1: Do you remember anything at all about the Sunday that
Speaker 1: you were tased and pulled over?
Speaker 5: I remember I went to them all and brought bought
Speaker 5: a brand new pair of shoes that when I woke
Speaker 5: up I didn't like anymore. But that's pretty much it.
Speaker 5: I don't even remember what happened earlier in the day.
Speaker 5: It was a really really weird thing. The only thing
Speaker 5: imber just getting no shoes, and then I had him
Speaker 5: in my trunk and I was gonna go show Curtis.
Speaker 5: That's all I remember.
Speaker 1: Matt and Stacy went home from the hospital with two
Speaker 1: big goals. The first was to do everything in their
Speaker 1: power to help Bryce heal. The second was to figure
Speaker 1: out what the hell happened. Stacey took the lead on
Speaker 1: Bryce's recovery. Doctors told her he only had about two
Speaker 1: months to try to fix the brain damage that could
Speaker 1: still be healed. He was going to rehab five days
Speaker 1: a week, eight hours a day.
Speaker 7: It was really really hard just to get him in
Speaker 7: the car. Like, you do not understand what he put
Speaker 7: me through.
Speaker 1: Bryce had been a sweet, kind kid. Now he unleashed
Speaker 1: an anger Stacy had never seen before.
Speaker 7: I mean, he beat the dash of my car so
Speaker 7: hard I thought he was going to blow the airbag.
Speaker 1: He had dramatic mood swings and was in a deep depression,
Speaker 1: and he suffered from terrible insomnia.
Speaker 7: The moodiness, it was unbearable. He was mean and bigger
Speaker 7: than me.
Speaker 1: Bryce looked like her son, He sounded like her son,
Speaker 1: but it was someone new inside. A familiar body.
Speaker 7: And when we would talk about things that we would
Speaker 7: assume he would be familiar with. I started to pick
Speaker 7: up on he would kind of fake it. You could
Speaker 7: just tell in his face that he was not remembering
Speaker 7: this childhood memory, which is awful. A memory is pretty important.
Speaker 1: You know, when Bryce saw the new pair of sneakers
Speaker 1: he'd bought the same day he was taste, he asked
Speaker 1: his mom who bought him those ugly ass shoes. At
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving dinner that year, he asked Stacy to make his
Speaker 1: favorite dessert, pecan bars. He took a few bites and
Speaker 1: apologized he just didn't like it anymore.
Speaker 7: And this is what he told me. He wanted to
Speaker 7: just wake up and be like he was before. And
Speaker 7: he remembered having a memory. He remembered not having a
Speaker 7: limp or dragging his leg. He remembered the abilities that
Speaker 7: he had, but he it was like he just didn't
Speaker 7: have access to them anymore. Like that's the unfortunate part
Speaker 7: about having a brain injury, is you remember being good
Speaker 7: at math, but now when you go to make change,
Speaker 7: you can't do it.
Speaker 1: Bryce once told me that he didn't think he was
Speaker 1: the kind of person to resist arrest or threaten a cob,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't know for sure.
Speaker 7: That was a very emotional and internal battle for him
Speaker 7: because he couldn't just tell himself you didn't do anything wrong,
Speaker 7: because he didn't remember what he did or didn't do.
Speaker 1: While Stacey was focused on Bryce's recovery, Matt went looking
Speaker 1: for answers. His first move was to figure out if
Speaker 1: Runnelds had pulled Bryce over because of a warrant.
Speaker 3: He made a few calls, a couple buddies on the
Speaker 3: apartment rain him through, and criminal record checked him, and
Speaker 3: you know he's like, Nanga, I don't fucking warrant. No,
Speaker 3: He's clean.
Speaker 1: There was a warrant out for the Grand Priest's license
Speaker 1: plate when Runnelds pulled Bryce over, but it was for
Speaker 1: a woman who committed a traffic violation from over one
Speaker 1: hundred miles away. There was a typo in the system.
Speaker 1: It was corrected after the stop. In his statement explaining
Speaker 1: why he stopped Bryce, Runnels claimed he pulled the car
Speaker 1: over because it had darkly tinted windows and that after
Speaker 1: he stopped Bryce, he detected an odor of marijuana coming
Speaker 1: from inside the vehicle.
Speaker 3: So then that just started this whole other doubt, you know,
Speaker 3: in my mind of like what's okay, what's really going on?
Speaker 1: Matt started to suspect that Runnels was covering his ass.
Speaker 1: The warrant wouldn't have been enough to justify stopping Bryce,
Speaker 1: so when Matt saw the statement, he thought Runnels changed
Speaker 1: his reason for pulling Bryce over to darkly tinted windows
Speaker 1: and then marijuana smell, which is subjective. Matt at Seene
Speaker 1: cops do this kind of thing. Before he told the
Speaker 1: FBI agents, he thought Runnels was working the case backwards,
Speaker 1: trying to justify a stop after it happened. Runnels also
Speaker 1: wrote that Bryce fused his commands and resisted arrest, which
Speaker 1: justified his use of the taser. So Matt became consumed
Speaker 1: with doubt. He obsessed over what everyone else thought. He
Speaker 1: watched every news story, and even worse, he read the
Speaker 1: opinions of strangers on social media and in online comments.
Speaker 1: One comment on Facebook says the kid was probably a thug,
Speaker 1: he probably broke the law, and another blames Matt directly.
Speaker 1: His dad should have raised a more respectful son.
Speaker 3: A lot of people tried to make Bryce out to
Speaker 3: be this piece of shit kid that, you know, his
Speaker 3: parents taught him not to respect law enforcement, and look
Speaker 3: what happened to him. Fuck him, you know, that's what should.
Speaker 1: Have happened to him. The comments got to Matt not
Speaker 1: because he was angry at them. Matt was afraid they
Speaker 1: were right. Cops don't just taze people for no reason.
Speaker 1: And then there was another big mystery. Matt was he
Speaker 1: unsure about why Ronald's tasered his son, but he was
Speaker 1: equally unsure about what doctor Augustin, Rice's surgeon in the
Speaker 1: trauma unit told him. Could the taser really stop Bryce's heart?
Speaker 3: At first, it was kind of like denial, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's not like that can't happen, you know. And then
Speaker 3: I just started researching on my own, googling taser stuff
Speaker 3: and looking at videos and looking up court cases and
Speaker 3: like things that had happened around the country. And I
Speaker 3: first saw the Stanley Harlan incident that had happened in Mobley, Missouri.
Speaker 1: Caught my Stanley Harlan, the kid who was my age
Speaker 1: when he was tasered in front of his house, the
Speaker 1: same case that caught my eye too six years before
Speaker 1: Matt started reading about him.
Speaker 3: I was like totally floored that that was even possible.
Speaker 1: Matt had heard news reports about people dying from tasers before,
Speaker 1: but always thought it was the media or act just
Speaker 1: out to get cops. He went back to the training
Speaker 1: that taught him the taser was safe. If people were dying,
Speaker 1: it was because they were on drugs, on a ledge,
Speaker 1: or fighting the police, excited delirium, et cetera. But after
Speaker 1: Matt learned about Stanley Harlan, he began to read other
Speaker 1: news articles, lots of them. Now with his mind open
Speaker 1: to the idea that the taser could cause harm, he
Speaker 1: read more stories of people who were shot by tasers
Speaker 1: in the chest.
Speaker 3: There was a kid named Darryl Turner that had I
Speaker 3: don't know what year Daryl died two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: So there's a video of Darryl Turner and he got
Speaker 3: tased and died.
Speaker 1: And suddenly Matt was seeing things from a completely different perspective.
Speaker 1: He started collecting the news articles and then actually looking
Speaker 1: up the lawsuits the articles were pointing to against Taser International,
Speaker 1: depositions in court filings alleging the company knew tasers caused
Speaker 1: cardiac arrest, so he began to print those out too.
Speaker 1: He put his pages in a brown accordion folder, and
Speaker 1: each day it.
Speaker 3: Got thicker, and I would say between like September fourteen,
Speaker 3: like in the December is when I really went down
Speaker 3: this rabbit hole and was coming across all this stuff,
Speaker 3: and I'm just like, why don't cops know any of
Speaker 3: this stuff? Like, if you knew this, you wouldn't use
Speaker 3: this thing. How the fuck is this even going on.
Speaker 1: That's when Matt started to read studies he'd never heard
Speaker 1: about before, ones that completely contradicted the studies he was
Speaker 1: familiar with from taser training. These studies clearly showed the
Speaker 1: taser's electric current could override someone's regular heartbeat like a
Speaker 1: pacemaker gone haywire, and speed it up to rapid rates.
Speaker 1: To rapid sometimes, like in his son's case, it could
Speaker 1: lead to a cardiac arrest. Doctors called it cardiac capture
Speaker 1: and hit Matt. This was the world where doctor Augustin lived.
Speaker 1: In this world, the taser could cause a cardiac arrest
Speaker 1: wasn't some myth, It was science. Why wasn't it seen
Speaker 1: as reality? In Matt's world? Cops were the ones using
Speaker 1: this weapon, and yet the only reason he was learning
Speaker 1: about the danger was because his own son got hurt.
Speaker 1: Even some of the company's studies were quietly admitting that
Speaker 1: Taser could affect the heart. Matt found one in a
Speaker 1: medical journal from twenty ten, published four years before Bryce
Speaker 1: was tasered. The study was run by doctor Jeff Hoe,
Speaker 1: Taser International's medical director at the time. He was testing
Speaker 1: a new Taser model. It was a slightly less powerful
Speaker 1: weapon than the X twenty six, and Hoe was pretty
Speaker 1: sure it was ready for sales. But one of the
Speaker 1: people observing the test with Taser's doctors was a paramedic
Speaker 1: turned cop, a guy who was getting more and more
Speaker 1: concerned about what he was being behind closed doors during
Speaker 1: pig tests. Oakland PDS Mike Leonesio he was still accepting
Speaker 1: invitations to Taser's tests, and some of the tests were
Speaker 1: not on pigs, they were on human beings. Mike remembers
Speaker 1: they started this test during the company's annual.
Speaker 2: Conference, and I mean it was a big fanfare, you know, lights,
Speaker 2: and they had the countdown clock.
Speaker 1: The conference was at a resort in Arizona and they
Speaker 1: were launching the new Taser X three. Mike says they
Speaker 1: had set up a lab and a trailer in the
Speaker 1: parking lot.
Speaker 2: They were asking for human volunteers, and you know, you've
Speaker 2: got a room of six hundred, eight hundred cops and
Speaker 2: they would give you a little perk, so like if
Speaker 2: you signed up, they would give you a T shirt,
Speaker 2: a lab rat T shirt.
Speaker 1: It actually had a rat on a lab ren Mike says.
Speaker 1: Doctor Hoe hooked each volunteer up to an ultrasound machine
Speaker 1: to get an accurate measure of their heart rhythm. During
Speaker 1: the taser shot. Mike was hanging out by the medical equipment.
Speaker 1: He walked does The first few guys got zapped without issue.
Speaker 2: So then we get to a sheriff's deputy sergeant from Texas.
Speaker 2: So he comes and he's not a real big guy,
Speaker 2: and he comes in and they run him through all
Speaker 2: the paces and they do the pre medical thing and
Speaker 2: get him behind the screen and they shoot him with
Speaker 2: the thing, and then they take him over and they
Speaker 2: lay him down, hook him all up and they hit
Speaker 2: him and they get cardiac captured.
Speaker 1: The electric current from this new taser model captured the
Speaker 1: deputy's normal heartbeat and sped it up again like a
Speaker 1: revd up pacemaker.
Speaker 2: I remember Hoe was standing there and I remember looking
Speaker 2: at the screen, and I said, that's capture.
Speaker 1: Mike had seen the taser effect the heart and pig testing,
Speaker 1: but this was a human during a controlled experiment designed
Speaker 1: to be as safe as possible.
Speaker 2: The deputy was fine. I mean, he didn't have any
Speaker 2: negative effects, he wasn't unconscious, he didn't do anything. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was really a couple of seconds maybe, but it
Speaker 2: was clearly capture.
Speaker 1: That was the thing. Cardiac capture wasn't a death sentence.
Speaker 1: Previous tests and pigs had shown that most of the
Speaker 1: time when the taser caused capture, the pig's hearts went
Speaker 1: back to normal when the shock was over. But this
Speaker 1: was the first human test on this new model, and
Speaker 1: not even ten volunteers in someone's heart got captured. Mike
Speaker 1: told me that doctor Host shut down the test. A
Speaker 1: few Taser employees hopped in a car and took the
Speaker 1: new prototype back to headquarters.
Speaker 2: Maybe a couple of hours went by, and the technical
Speaker 2: guys come back and I said, wait a minute, hold
Speaker 2: on a minute. We just saw what happened here. You're
Speaker 2: going to start up again. And they said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know. We fixed the problem. And I said,
Speaker 2: what do you mean, you fix the problem, and these
Speaker 2: are the exact words.
Speaker 1: I said, well, we tweaked it.
Speaker 2: I said, you tweaked what he says, we took the
Speaker 2: weapon and we tweaked it. It's fine now. And I said, well,
Speaker 2: what is a tweak What does that mean? And that's
Speaker 2: all they would say is we tweaked it. It's fine,
Speaker 2: It's okay now.
Speaker 1: Months later, doctor Hoe was questioned about the incident under
Speaker 1: oath and he said he didn't know what they did
Speaker 1: to tweak it either. At the time, Mike remembers he
Speaker 1: couldn't believe they were going forward with the test.
Speaker 2: I said, you know, you guys are downplaying this thing,
Speaker 2: and you know, everything's fine. And granted, I'm glad there's
Speaker 2: nothing wrong with the deputy. I'm glad that it was
Speaker 2: just you know, we saw it was a couple of seconds.
Speaker 2: No big Well, I'm not going to say no big deal,
Speaker 2: because any time you're affecting the heart like that, it
Speaker 2: is it is a big deal. But the fact that
Speaker 2: they just wouldn't tell me what they did, what was wrong,
Speaker 2: how they fixed it, that was a little disturbing. So
Speaker 2: I went home still concerned.
Speaker 1: Mike says he kept bringing up the incident with doctor
Speaker 1: Hoe and the other scientists running the test, and at.
Speaker 2: First their response was no, no, this was an aberration.
Speaker 2: This is like you know, statistically, it's not significant, it's
Speaker 2: not relevant. I said, look, if you don't report this
Speaker 2: in your study, then I'm going to report it. So
Speaker 2: they said, fine, all right, we'll make sure that it's
Speaker 2: in there, and I said, okay.
Speaker 1: Five years later, Matt Masters was printing documents off the
Speaker 1: Internet and putting them in his folder. That's when he
Speaker 1: saw training bulletin fifteen, issued by Taser International on September thirtieth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, about three months after the human test.
Speaker 1: Mike saw Matt read the eighteen page document and his
Speaker 1: jaw dropped Underneath a bullet point labeled cardiac. He read
Speaker 1: the risk of an adverse cardiac event related to a
Speaker 1: Taser ECD discharge is deemed to be extremely low. This
Speaker 1: meant that five years before Timothy Runnels tasered Bryce, Taser
Speaker 1: International told cops the taser could affect the heart, but
Speaker 1: at least in Matt's case, he'd never heard it before.
Speaker 3: Nobody ever told us any of this when I first
Speaker 3: got trained, and I want to say around two thousand
Speaker 3: and four ish. You know, fast forward to twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: ten years later, there was no change in what I
Speaker 3: was trained to know. Ford to twenty.
Speaker 1: Fourteen, all cops got basically the same training on tasers.
Speaker 1: If Matt didn't know a taser could cause cardiac arrest,
Speaker 1: why would the guy who shot his son in the
Speaker 1: chest with a taser? No, So Matt was wondering if
Speaker 1: this was just a tragic mistake. What if Bryce resisted
Speaker 1: arrest and Runalds thought he was doing the right thing.
Speaker 3: And then I started kind of doubt my and really thinking, well,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe he really didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 1: So six months after Timothy Runnells tase Bryce, Matt and
Speaker 1: Stacy were surprised to learn that Runnels was going to
Speaker 1: be criminally charged. It's rare officers are given lots of
Speaker 1: leeway through the objectively reasonable standard established by the Supreme Court. Basically,
Speaker 1: if another cop in the same circumstances would make the
Speaker 1: same choice, it's considered reasonable. There's no official stat but
Speaker 1: nonprofits estimate less than one percent of officers are prosecuted
Speaker 1: for excessive force. In Runnel's case, there were four charges.
Speaker 1: Matt read through each of them, but he didn't find
Speaker 1: any details about what actually happened that day or what
Speaker 1: Bryce did to deserve being tasered. Paul It said was
Speaker 1: that Runnels continuously tasered Bryce and that he deliberately dropped
Speaker 1: Bryce on his face. Runnels decided to take a plea deal.
Speaker 1: He pled guilty, but only to one charge. He would
Speaker 1: only admit that he deliberately dropped Bryce on his face.
Speaker 1: Prosecutors dropped the other three charges. When Matt, Stacey and
Speaker 1: Bryce made their way to the federal courthouse in downtown
Speaker 1: Kansas City in September of twenty fifteen, they sat on
Speaker 1: the right side of the courtroom. A judge called Timothy
Speaker 1: Runnels to the stand and he pled guilty to the
Speaker 1: one remaining charge, deliberately dropping Bryce's face first on the ground.
Speaker 1: The hearing lasted less than thirty minutes. Runnels was going
Speaker 1: to go to prison for four years. He'd already lost
Speaker 1: his job, but if he hadn't dropped Bryce on his
Speaker 1: face after tasering him, he might still be a cop.
Speaker 1: The hearing was paid ful for Matt, Stacey and Bryce,
Speaker 1: but there were no surprises. It was what happened after
Speaker 1: that they remember most. As they were getting up to leave.
Speaker 1: The assistant US attorney invited them into a conference room
Speaker 1: and asked if they wanted to see the dashcam footage.
Speaker 1: It had been almost one year to the day since
Speaker 1: Bryce was tasered, a year of wondering what really happened.
Speaker 1: Finally they wouldn't have to wonder anymore. The video opens.
Speaker 1: The camera shows what Runnel sees when he starts to
Speaker 1: follow Bryce in his car. It is a gorgeous late
Speaker 1: summer day. Suburban lawns and green oak trees pass by
Speaker 1: in the frame. Bryce's gray Pontiac Grand Prix stays in
Speaker 1: focus for about twenty seconds before Runnels flicks on his siren.
Speaker 1: Bryce pulls over in front of his friend Curtis's.
Speaker 3: House outside of man and a silver Pontiac.
Speaker 1: It's like one I.
Speaker 7: He's realizing his King Henry one.
Speaker 1: Runnels gets out of his cruiser and crosses the screen,
Speaker 1: walking toward Bryce's passenger side door. Roll all the way down,
Speaker 1: that's Runnell's voice.
Speaker 6: Okay, hey, you got roll the way down, but.
Speaker 1: The passenger window is broken. Bryce asks, you can't hear me.
Speaker 3: Hear me roll it all the way down. I can
Speaker 3: heave it. Roll it all the way down for what.
Speaker 1: Donalds crosses the frame again, marching towards Bryce's driver's side door.
Speaker 1: Bryce tries to explain that his window doesn't roll down,
Speaker 1: just one opens.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what he's doing?
Speaker 4: Get out, pullet out down.
Speaker 1: Runnels opens Bryce's door, But what out?
Speaker 5: Hey, minor arrest?
Speaker 7: Get out, mine arrest out.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna pull you, don't.
Speaker 1: He opens the door and says I'm gonna pull you
Speaker 1: out if you don't get out. Bryce is doing what
Speaker 1: his parents told him to do. If a cop asks
Speaker 1: you to get out of a car, you should ask why.
Speaker 1: But Runnalds won't answer. He reaches into the car and
Speaker 1: starts to pull Bryce out by the collar of his shirt,
Speaker 1: but Bryce grabs the steering wheel and Runnelds loses his grip.
Speaker 1: Get out.
Speaker 7: Do you really want to get page right in your middle?
Speaker 1: Get your ass out and out. Runnelds tries to pull
Speaker 1: Bryce out one more time.
Speaker 7: I haven't done anything off.
Speaker 4: I haven't done anything off, sir.
Speaker 6: What am I under arrest?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Am I under arrest?
Speaker 7: Mind the red line the wret you.
Speaker 6: Man, You're under arrest for what?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: For what? Ronald steps back about two feet and pulls
Speaker 1: out his taser. He points it at Bryce.
Speaker 3: All right, find Fucky, just get out out out right now,
Speaker 3: out of the car.
Speaker 1: You can hear the familiar rhythmic sound of the taser.
Speaker 1: In the room where Matt and Stacy are watching the
Speaker 1: dash can video for the first time, they're horrified. Bryce
Speaker 1: steps out of the driver door, his arms tense and
Speaker 1: stiff at his side as the taser's electric current pulses
Speaker 1: through his body at nineteen times a second.
Speaker 6: Okay's the appointment on the ground, under the car, on
Speaker 6: the ground, on the ground. Ah, don'd you hands on
Speaker 6: your back?
Speaker 2: What about?
Speaker 1: Bryce is not moving on the screen as run handcuffs
Speaker 1: h the click click, click, still ticking. Matt has no
Speaker 1: idea that Bryce had been tased for so long. In
Speaker 1: the conference room where he and his family are watching,
Speaker 1: Matt stands up and screams of the TV. Let off
Speaker 1: the goddamn trigger. Finally, after about twenty seconds, it stops.
Speaker 1: A taser cycle only lasts for five seconds. This was
Speaker 1: the moment when Matt first understood that Bryce had been
Speaker 1: tased more than once, that Runnels had held down on
Speaker 1: the trigger, tasering Bryce for at least twenty seconds straight.
Speaker 1: In the video, Runnel's yanks Bryce up by his arms.
Speaker 1: He drags him behind Bryce's car toward the curb, and
Speaker 1: he throws Bryce handcuffed and in cardiac arrest, on his face.
Speaker 1: His chin hits the curb. This is the moment Bryce's
Speaker 1: teeth shattered. Runnels starts going through Bryce's pockets. You don't
Speaker 1: like to play by the rules.
Speaker 2: Do you?
Speaker 1: Runnels puts his foot on Bryce's back and stands over him.
Speaker 1: Right lerk it up.
Speaker 7: I don't play games.
Speaker 1: But Bryce is still laying on his chest, handcuffed, his
Speaker 1: face pressed against the curb. A minute thirty seconds have
Speaker 1: now passed since Ronald's first taste. Bryce Runnelds calls an ambulance.
Speaker 1: It's protocol for independence, PD.
Speaker 7: You ready to sit up now?
Speaker 6: I've been tased a dozen times. Doesn't act like that.
Speaker 1: Bryce isn't moving. Six minutes after Runnald's first taste, ice
Speaker 1: paramedics arrive.
Speaker 7: He's trying to Blue Wise to look.
Speaker 1: You know, he's hurt of blue.
Speaker 6: You bring that on?
Speaker 5: Oh wow, man, a bull stickle Marguts starts call me that.
Speaker 1: About seven minutes after Runnel's first tase Bryce, paramedics shock
Speaker 1: Bryce's heart with an automated defibrillator. About fifteen minutes after
Speaker 1: Runnel's taste, Bryce, Matt, and Stacy arrive watching in the
Speaker 1: conference room. They can't see themselves on the video, but
Speaker 1: they can hear each other shouting off screen for a
Speaker 1: fucking dance, jack of you the fuck that. It's hard
Speaker 1: to see on the dash video, but if you look closely,
Speaker 1: there's a small bag of marijuana on the roof of
Speaker 1: Bryce's car.
Speaker 7: Right, You're right right.
Speaker 1: Paramedics wheeled Bryce on a stretcher across the screen. Stacy
Speaker 1: follows behind. She can't. Stacy stands next to Bryce's car,
Speaker 1: her hands pressed to her cheeks, and watches as paramedics
Speaker 1: lift Bryce into an ambulance. The video ends.
Speaker 7: And I had really prepared myself to see something, some
Speaker 7: sort of threatening behavior, whether he was going to flick
Speaker 7: a cigarette out of the you know, or something that
Speaker 7: could be perceived as threatening, or words, or maybe some
Speaker 7: disrespectful dialogue between the two of them or something. Bryce
Speaker 7: didn't do anything, and I just couldn't believe it. I
Speaker 7: just couldn't believe what I saw. What did he do?
Speaker 7: That's what I didn't see was what was so shocking
Speaker 7: to me, aside from how this man that did this
Speaker 7: to Bryce just treated him like an animal, I mean
Speaker 7: worse than an animal. He didn't deserve this. Somewhere along
Speaker 7: the lines, I had placed a little bit of preparedness
Speaker 7: that he did something and he didn't.
Speaker 3: I'm mad at myself because I doubted Bryce. You know,
Speaker 3: I did doubt Bryce. I doubted Bryce woman. I doubted
Speaker 3: Timothy Reynolds.
Speaker 1: Matt told me about how a couple months later he
Speaker 1: attended an annual in service training on tasers, kind of
Speaker 1: like an annual refresher course for the Kansas City PD.
Speaker 1: There would go over any changes in case law or
Speaker 1: new information from the previous year. Matt thought Bryce's case
Speaker 1: would come up during the session. You can imagine what
Speaker 1: an emotional hurdle this was for Matt, but he gathered
Speaker 1: all his courage. He wanted to make one concise point.
Speaker 1: If cops were going to shoot people in the chest,
Speaker 1: they needed to know that taser might kill someone. He
Speaker 1: described how he sat in the back of the room
Speaker 1: and watched patiently as the instructor went over the same
Speaker 1: talking points he'd always heard. Be careful shooting people who
Speaker 1: could fall off a ledge or might be close to
Speaker 1: something flammable like gasoline. One point was different from when
Speaker 1: he was first trained, don't use tasers on people who
Speaker 1: are simply arguing with you. But the moment, Matt says
Speaker 1: he was waiting for, when they would go over what
Speaker 1: happened to Bryce and bring up the warning, the one
Speaker 1: that warned officers there was a chance the taser could
Speaker 1: cause cardiac arrest, the one in that eighteen page bulletin
Speaker 1: Matt was keeping in his folder, the one Taser International
Speaker 1: released five years before his own kid was nearly killed.
Speaker 1: That warning never came up.
Speaker 3: That's what caught me off guards because I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 3: my son just got tas and wining cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1: It felt like a lie biomission, you know.
Speaker 3: I'm just like dying inside, like whoa bro, Like seriously,
Speaker 3: like you're gonna fucking sit here and say that there's
Speaker 3: no cardiac risk.
Speaker 1: According to the Kansas City Police Department, Taser International's eighteen
Speaker 1: page bulletin did make it into the department's training when
Speaker 1: it was first announced, but they decided that it wasn't
Speaker 1: relevant enough to repeat every year. Sitting in the back
Speaker 1: of that training, Matt told me that he thought about Bryce.
Speaker 1: He thought about how it could be any one of
Speaker 1: them in that room tasing some kid in the chest,
Speaker 1: causing a cardiac arrest. He told me. He raised his hand.
Speaker 1: He pointed out that the risks of cardiac arrest were
Speaker 1: very real. Hell, they were personal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you're sitting there going, hey, my kid got
Speaker 3: tays and went in cardiac arrest. Like, if you need
Speaker 3: somebody to talk to, come talk to this.
Speaker 1: Guy, right, Matt says. The instructor told him in front
Speaker 1: of the entire class that he was simply teaching the
Speaker 1: slides that Taser International provided. Matt warned the other cops
Speaker 1: in the room they weren't getting the full story, but
Speaker 1: they looked at him like he was crazy, and.
Speaker 3: It's just basically like a middle finger to me. And
Speaker 3: I was just kind of like, Okay, well I see
Speaker 3: where this is. You know, nobody's going to listen.
Speaker 1: That Taser training clarified a lot for Matt. That's where
Speaker 1: he changed his mind about who was to blame for what. Yes,
Speaker 1: Timothy Runnels was responsible for being cruel and brutal, and
Speaker 1: he was going to prison for it. But what happened
Speaker 1: to Bryce wasn't just on runnels. Taser International was responsible
Speaker 1: for misleading hundreds of thousands of cops all over the world,
Speaker 1: making them think they had a weapon that couldn't kill. Now,
Speaker 1: Matt decided Taser International was responsible for Bryce's brain damage
Speaker 1: and he wanted to make them pay next time. On
Speaker 1: Absolute Season one Taser Incorporated.
Speaker 3: My focus really, I was like, let's go after Taser.
Speaker 3: Let's go after Taser, Mashal, That's the big one.
Speaker 6: I want to start by addressing a couple of questions
Speaker 6: we've been receiving over email. The first one is our
Speaker 6: chest hits with the Taser dangerous and the answer to
Speaker 6: that is definitively no.
Speaker 3: This is really going to be hard to prove that
Speaker 3: the Taser did this. The company that makes these things
Speaker 3: is going to fight you.
Speaker 1: Absolute Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good
Speaker 1: in association with Signal Company Number One. Be sure to
Speaker 1: follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and threads at Lava
Speaker 1: for Good. Follow me at Nick Beredini on Instagram and Twitter.
Speaker 1: Taser Incorporated is written and produced by me Nick Beredini.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis.
Speaker 1: Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Paul is our producer.
Speaker 1: Hannah Biel is our writer and producer. Joe Plored is
Speaker 1: our sound designer. Music composed and produced by Alexis Quadrado
Speaker 1: at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Mariann mckune is our editor.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Dania Suleiman. Jeff Cliburn is our head
Speaker 1: of marketing and Operations. Our social media director is East
Speaker 1: Marine Guardama, our social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and
Speaker 1: our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional reporting by Matt Stroud.