SD State’s Attorney says Tasering Girl Was Best Option; Family Outraged

Vincent Schilling
9/4/14
Two months after an 8-year-old girl was tasered by a Pierre, South Dakota police officer in October of 2013, Hughes County State’s Attorney Wendy Kloeppner released a report which stated “she was satisfied with an independent investigation, deploying a taser was the best viable way to diffuse the situation,” and no charges would be filed against the officer or the child.

In a response to the report, which also includes a copy of the Pierre Police Department’s report, attorneys for the family, Dana Hanna and Patrick Duffy, told ICTMN the acts committed by the police were atrocious and that they do not believe the report accurately reflects what happened.

In addition, the mother of the child, Dawn Stenstrom, and the grandmother, Rose Stenstrom, have shared their emotionally charged outrage with ICTMN, claiming that several statements by the police were inaccurate and that the tasering of the girl could have easily been avoided.

Stenstrom says that the officers must not have made much effort to calm her daughter because she was tasered within two minutes of the police officers arriving on the scene.

As ICTMN reported last month, in October four Pierre police officers responded to a 911 call about an 8-year-old girl wielding a knife. The call came from the babysitter of the Rosebud Sioux girl, who told the dispatcher the girl was trying to cut herself. The officers, according to the police report, were on the scene for just two minutes before tasering the youth.


Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/09/04/sd-states-attorney-says-tasering-girl-was-best-option-family-outraged-156708