Officers Use Stun Gun to Subdue Girl Waving Knife

A distraught eighth-grader who was waving a knife on a North Hollywood campus was shot with electrically charged darts by police and rendered harmless Tuesday after officers and school administrators could not persuade her to drop the weapon, authorities said.

The 13-year-old girl, who was not identified because she is a juvenile, suffered no lasting injury in the 40-minute episode that ended about 10:30 a.m. at Walter Reed Junior High School, police and school administrators said. Police said she would be held for psychiatric evaluation for as long as 72 hours.

Principal Larry Tash said a teacher noticed the girl standing alone near a fence on the campus while other students were in class. The girl was holding a paring knife.

“She was distraught,” Tash said. “She was babbling, holding the knife and waving it around.”

Tash said the girl was upset over a relationship with a boy. Tash kept all students in classrooms during the incident. He said none of the students could see the confrontation with the girl. When Tash and a group of teachers were unable to persuade her to drop the weapon, police were called.

Police said the girl continued to make threatening moves with the knife at herself and others and said she was going to injure another student. Capt. Richard LeGarra said officers were unable to approach her safely.

“When you have an individual who poses a danger to herself or others, you don’t have a lot of alternatives,” LeGarra said.

He said officers could have tried to close in and swing a baton at her, hoping to disarm her, but such a maneuver was likely to leave her injured or an officer stabbed if he was unsuccessful in knocking the knife from her grasp.

“I think using a Taser would be the best thing to do,” LeGarra said. “Her behavior was irrational. You are dealing with someone who isn’t listening.”

LeGarra said Tasers are routinely used to deal with mentally disturbed people who are armed and dangerous. The Taser gun fires two darts that temporarily stun and immobilize a target with 50,000 volts of electricity.

Sgt. Robert Ontiveros said officers were unable to persuade the girl to drop the weapon and determined that using a Taser gun “was the only way to make her give up the knife” without injuring herself or others.

“They tased her and that eliminated the problem,” Ontiveros said.

LeGarra stressed that before the girl was shot with the darts, officers tried to calm her for several minutes and called a police supervisor and an ambulance to the scene.

“They took precautions,” LeGarra said. “We wanted to do the right thing.”

Afterward, the girl was taken to Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley where the darts were removed and she showed no ill effects from the incident, police said. She was then taken to Olive View-UCLA Medical Center for observation.

Ontiveros said that, in keeping with department procedure, the department would conduct a use-of-force investigation of the officers.

The Taser gun became well-known after the beating of Rodney G. King last year in Lake View Terrace. During that incident, King was shot with a Taser but showed no effect from the charge and officers used batons to subdue him.

Twice last year, men in Los Angeles County died after being shot with Taser darts.

In July, a mentally disturbed Reseda man died of cardiac arrest after he was shot with Taser darts by police. He had broken into a neighbor’s apartment and destroyed furnishings while ranting about his life being in danger. In April, 1991, a Pasadena man died of a heart attack after being subdued with a Taser.

In 1990, The Times reported that the maker of the Taser stun gun, which is used by hundreds of police agencies, filed documents with the federal government that said the Taser poses a special threat to people with heart ailments.