Ex-Okla. officers convicted of murder after tasing unarmed man more than 50 times

Two former Oklahoma police officers were convicted of murder for using their Tasers more than 50 times on an unarmed man who died in 2019, court records show.

Brandon Dingman, 35, and Joshua Taylor, 27, were convicted Friday of seconddegree murder in the death of Jared Lakey, 28, with the court ruling that the officers’ repeated use of their Tasers on the man in July 2019 was “dangerous and unnecessary.” Dingman and Taylor using their Tasers dozens of times was a “substantial factor” in Lakey’s death, according to court records, and “greatly exceeded what would have been necessary or warranted by the attendant circumstances.”

The former officers with the Wilson Police Department in Wilson, Oklahoma, each face 10 years to life in prison for the seconddegree-murder charge. The jury in Carter County also found the pair guilty of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

Dingman and Taylor are scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 2.

“The Lakey family is grateful to the jury and the District Attorney for the convictions, but the risk to the public remains,” Spencer Bryan, an attorney for Lakey’s family, told The Washington Post in a statement. The family had filed a civil rights lawsuit after medical providers told them that Lakey, whose body was riddled with marks from the Taser shots, died of a heart attack, having suffered more than one. “These officers didn’t violate their policy or training, they tortured Jared precisely because that’s how Wilson, Oklahoma, decided to police the community.”

The Wilson Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Neither Shannon McMurray, an attorney for Dingman, nor Warren Gotcher, an attorney for Taylor, immediately responded to requests for comment. The lawyers told the New York Times that they planned to appeal the convictions. They noted an autopsy report describing how Lakey had an enlarged heart and critical coronary artery disease before he died.

“We’re very disappointed in the verdict,” Gotcher told the Times. “No one could look at him and tell that he had that much of a diseased heart.”

The conviction is yet another incident involving police and their use of Tasers in recent years. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that more than 1,000 people in the United States had died after they were shocked with Tasers or other stun guns by police.

In March, police rushed a 67-year-old man to the hospital after they used a Taser on him while he was handcuffed in Port Allen, Louisiana. Two months later, an unarmed 75-year-old Colorado man was Tasered without warning by an officer. The man, Michael Clark, suffered a stroke and a burst appendix, the Associated Press reported. He was hospitalized for weeks, according to the Denver Post, and later admitted to a nursing facility.

The incident in Wilson, about 100 miles south of Oklahoma City, occurred late July 4, 2019, when Taylor and Dingman responded to a call about a man “acting in a disorderly way,” according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

A public records lawsuit filed by Lakey’s family found that police responded to a report of a man “screaming and running down the road.” Investigators said Lakey refused to comply with the commands of the officers. That’s when the officers “used their Tasers multiple times,” the state said.

But dashboard-camera and body-camera video obtained by The Post shows the officers using their Tasers 53 times on Lakey while he was detained. According to the officers’ Taser data logs in the court filings, Taylor deployed his weapon 30 times for a total of more than two minutes, while Dingman used his Taser 23 times for just under two minutes total.