A 43-year-old man died yesterday after Long Island cops shot him twice with a Taser. Officers used the weapon on Darryl Bain, 43, after he locked himself and his 78-year-old mother — who had a restraining order against him — in her Coram home.
After calls to 911 from relatives, police barged into the house at around 2:45 pm and tried to subdue Bain, who at the time was high on cocaine. Cops shot him with a Taser, but they were unable to cuff the 6-foot-3 and 240-pound man, so they shot him a second time. Moments later, he stopped breathing.
Bain's mother, Phyllis Hawkins, told the Daily News that her son's breath smelled of alcohol at the time of his death and that he had long struggled with drugs and booze. "Alcohol did not agree with him," said Hawkins, who noted that police had been called on her son at least 70 times since 2000 due to his behavior when he drank and used drugs. That said, she didn't think that police needed to use a Taser her son. "[The police] know that when he gets like that, he calms himself down," she told the paper. "He seemed to be getting himself together from what he did."
Investigators are still working to determine the cause of death. Tasers became a controversial police tool after the widely publicized death of an emotionally disturbed man who was shot in the chest with the weapon last September. Since then, NYPD cops have been instructed to not aim their Tasers at the chest — though a Brooklyn sergeant tells the Post that the weapon isn't effective if it is pointed elsewhere because both of a Taser's prongs must strike flesh for it to deliver a shock, and the darts tend to veer away from each other in the air. "You can't aim it at the place where it's most likely to work, so it's rendered useless," said the Brooklyn sergeant, who told the tabloid he has used the weapon about 20 times.
