Chase Sherman: Mom Of Man Tasered To Death By Georgia Cops Says He Was Tortured
The mother of a man fatally injured after being tasered multiple times by deputy sheriffs last year opened up this week amid a lawsuit against Coweta County, Georgia. She said that her son was tortured and his life should have never ended so coldly.
People reports that Chase Sherman, 32, started acting erratically on November 20, 2015, after using synthetic marijuana. He was riding in a car with his mother, Mary Ann Sherman, his father, Kevin Sherman, and his fiancée, Patti Galloway, on the way home to Florida from the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
Worried about his health and state of mind, Chases’ mother, Mary Ann Sherman, called the police for assistance. According to the 911 call, Mary Ann Sherman informed a 911 dispatcher that her son was freaking out.
“We are on Highway 85 and my son is freaking out!”
When the dispatcher asked what caused Chase to act this way, Mary Ann Sherman said that drugs were causing her son to hallucinate and she was worried that he was going to “kill us all” if they didn’t get help.
15 jolts from a Taser were too much for Chase Sherman’s body to handle. Video shows cops kill hallucinating man https://t.co/fMCMombkVu
— Nick Wing (@nickpwing) May 20, 2016
After deputy sheriffs from the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they immediately began shouting at Chase. The 32-year-old resisted, and police handcuffed him while in the backseat of the family vehicle, as seen in one of the deputy’s body cam footage.
The deputies told him to stop resisting while his mother pleaded with the police not to shoot him. Instead of shooting Chase, they tasered him with 50,000 volts of electricity 15 times. Mary Ann Sherman said she can’t get the image out of her head.
“We relive this all the time. It keeps going through our heads. I could just see the Taser lights going off in the car. It seems like it went on forever.”
Although Chase resisted at first, he appeared to give up after around a minute. Yet, even after he said he gave up, officers continued to taser him. One officer is heard on a body cam video saying that he thinks he’ll be fired after the incident, but another officer tells him “he’s good.”
“Dude, I’m [expletive] fired, man.”
“Nah, you’re good.”
Chase stopped breathing shortly after. Deputies immediately pulled him out of the car and called for an ambulance. He was taken to a local hospital, where he pronounced dead.
The deputy heard on the video, who still remains employed by the Coweta Sheriff’s Office, declined to comment about the case. Yet another officer, Sheriff Mike Yeager, previously indicated that the deputy didn’t do anything wrong and that he was simply trying to get a “combative” person, who grabbed a taser from an officer, under control.
RT @Ryan11Alive This is tough to watch. Body cam videos released of Chase Sherman taser… https://t.co/KLBEw5AaN2 pic.twitter.com/KuYyQlEkDl
— 11Alive News (@11AliveNews) May 20, 2016
“They’re trying to get him under control. And he’s fighting with them. He’s fighting with everybody there….The attorneys are portraying him as a victim. He is not the victim in this case. The parents and the fiancée – they are the victims in this case.”
Mary Ann Sherman disagrees. She remembered being ordered to the front of a vehicle while deputies kept tasering her son, and her first thought was that they were going to kill him.
“‘I said, ‘they’re killing him.’ He wasn’t armed and he was handcuffed. So how could he hurt them? He wasn’t going to kill them.”
Kevin Sherman added that it didn’t seem to matter that Chase told them he gave up and that the officers continued to taser him numerous times after he calmed down.
“If you look at the video, Chase said, ‘I quit, I quit,’ a minute and three quarters into this. I know he fought with them, but after he came out of that state of mind, he realized what was going on and he said, ‘I quit, I quit.’ And those brutal dogs kept going after him.”
The family has now filed a lawsuit against Coweta County. They hired attorney L. Chris Stewart to help get justice for their son. Mary Ann Sherman stated that she also wants to make sure nothing like this happens to other families.
“We want justice for our son but we also don’t want this to happen to other families.”
The local District Attorney’s office is still investigating the case. The family is still waiting to hear if Coweta County DA Peter Skandalakis will bring the case before a grand jury. The Sherman family also hopes that the officers involved in the death of Chase Sherman are punished for their actions. Kevin Sherman would like the see them lose their jobs and land behind bars.
“I hope that these guys get stripped of their jobs and they go to jail along with the EMT. My personal opinion is that the head sheriff should lose his authority too for saying these guys did everything to the law.”
[Image via Shutterstock]
