Tasered –When there’s no camera, there are few questions
Winnipeg Free Press March 30
When Winnipeggger Aaron James learned that Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered by RCMP at the Vancouver Airport in October, his first reaction was deep compassion. His second was the feeling of renewed dread common to people suffering post-traummatic stress.
“That could have been me,” he says.
Aaron James was jolted by a Taser in an airplane on the runway in the Twin Cities in January 2006.
Like Robert Dziekanski, the 31-year-old Winnipegger experienced a violent taser ordeal at a metropolitan airport. Like Dziekanski, he is a vulnerable traveller; he has suffered from recurring anxiety attacks. As in the Dziekanski case, the police told their own version.
But unlike the Vancouver incident, no good citizen with a camera captured events.
“A camera would have changed everything,” says Aaron, whose mother Linda was a witness to what he describes as a taser assault at the Minneapolis Airport in January 2006.
The two were on a trip to the Mayo Clinic for treatment on Aaron’s injured right arm when their luggage was seized, searched and damaged. A note attached to the returned luggage explained the search was “due to security concerns.” Aaron, whose heritage is Afro-Caribbean, saw the intervention as racial profiling. When they were returning to Winnipeg, James told check-in attendants he and his mother intended to complain about it.
Dean Preest, a spokesman for Northwest Airlines, says the company declines to comment on the events that followed. Settling in on Northwest flight 1628 from Minneapolis to Winnipeg, Aaron and Linda James were both disappointed that the medical procedure on which they’d pinned their hopes had been cancelled. Aaron was disheartened and in severe discomfort.
He set his carry-on bag on the empty seat next to his mother and made his way to the plane’s washroom. Returning to his seat, he crossed paths in the aisle with a flight attendant who said something to him. Lost in his thoughts, he failed to respond. Apparently offended, junior flight attendant Sherri Caudill followed her passenger down the aisle to row eight.
A few minutes earlier, Caudill had questioned Linda about the carry-on bag and was now asking Aaron loudly “Do you have a problem here?” He assured her several times he did not. For the next five minutes, the junior attendant questioned him repeatedly. Embarrassed, he stood up and told Caudill he’d heard enough and asked her not to speak to him again. Caudill said she was going to tell the captain that she thought Aaron James shouldn’t be on this flight.
“Aaron was upset - who wouldn’t be? — but he remained calm and polite through it all,” his mother says. Senior flight attendant Beverly Banks would later comment that, although Aaron looked “like a guy ready to explode,” he never raised his voice or made threats of any kind.
Five armed Minneapolis Airport Police officers boarded flight 1628. Aaron James followed their instructions to rise and stand in the aisle and, when he asked, was politely assured he was neither charged nor under arrest. When he inquired under whose authority he was being removed from the plane, Aaron says the lead officer barked “Cuff him!” and lunged toward Aaron, the others falling in behind him.
“I was shocked, but mainly afraid of more injury to my right arm,” Aaron says. “I put my left hand lightly on the officer’s chest and took a step back to explain.”
He never got the chance.
When the lead officer was touched on his chest, he yelled out for tasers and two were passed forward. Each carried 50,000 volts of electricity. The officer closest to Aaron Tasered his chest. He dropped both arms to his sides, then fell to the floor. The officer with the taser knelt on his shoulder and applied it several times to Aaron’s chest and stomach; a second officer Tasered Aaron as well.
Photographs show multiple burns on his body, and a long gash beside his left eye, from his fall.
As the police were rushing him, Aaron and his mother say two of them tripped on each other in the aisle and fell. One was injured and three days later accused Aaron, several inches shorter and several feet away, of head-butting him.
While in custody in a treatment room, one of the officers confided companionably to Aaron, “Well, hey, you’re a pretty big guy, you know, and we were afraid you might do something. We had to act.” Aaron James is 5-9, but he’s a former bodybuilder with a solid physique.
He was taken from the hospital to the Hennepin Detention Centre in downtown Minneapolis.
Linda James slept on a bench in the police station that night, waiting for the incident to be cleared up and for her son to join her for the trip home.
It was three days before her son was charged, five days before she was able to see him again, and nine days before he would be released on bail.
“They took my personal belongings, even my underwear,” Aaron said. “I was in a cold cell with no blanket, no socks and very little food. The lights were on all night. I developed a rash after two nights on the prison cot. I was held by myself for 23 out of every 24 hours. I had no contact with my family and no legal advice for four days. I was given paper and pencil to make notes, but the notes disappeared. The doctor who had seen me ordered ongoing medical attention, but it never came.”
Laws passed after 911 allow police in the U.S. and Canada to detain citizens without charges for 72 hours. On his third day in prison, Aaron James’s charge sheets were tossed through a flap at the bottom of his cell door. There were two charges of felony assault causing grievous bodily harm to the officer Aaron says tripped and injured himself and one of obstructing a legal process, allegedly refusing to be removed from the plane. Five months later, none of these charges held up in a Minneapolis court.
Later that day, two FBI agents, Mark Rensch and Chris Sheppard, interrogated Aaron. They asked him to look at and identify pictures of men he didn’t know. They asked him whether he was a terrorist, whether he knew anyone connected to al-Qaida and to the Taliban. They asked him also to explain in detail his ethnic and family history. At his hearing, Aaron James pleaded not guilty to all charges. He was released on a $25,000 unsecured bond.
Linda James hired a Minneapolis lawyer to see the matter through to trial set for June 2006. He charged $25,000, up front. The Jameses were surprised when he recommended a plea bargain. There were several offers, each more accommodating than the last.
“The last one in April of 2006 was a guarantee of no jail time instead of the nine years I was first threatened with. If I would plead guilty, it would all go away. But that meant saying that the airline and the police were innocent and no-one would ever know what really happened,” Aaron says. “I couldn’t be a witness to a lie.”
Three days before the trial, at a hasty Saturday meeting, Minneapolis Police, FBI and U.S. prosecutors decided to add another charge against Aaron James: minor assault. The Jameses were not informed until they arrived in court.
It was that charge only of which Aaron James was found guilty, a verdict he and his mother dispute as passionately as they did the earlier, more serious charges.
The Jameses later discovered that shortly before the unwell and anxious Aaron was removed from flight 1628 in January of 2006, employees at the Minneapolis Airport, including police and Northwest Airlines, had undergone training in “behaviour pattern recognition”, or BPR, a highly controversial strategy designed to identify possible terrorists by their disconcerting body language. Pat Hogan, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis airport, says that BPR trains personnel to be alert to anyone who appears uncomfortable and/or suspicious in and around the airport, but maintains that “it’s intended to avoid confrontation rather than precipitate it. It’s kind of like community policing; it merely starts a conversation,” he said.
Hogan declined to say more, noting it would be unwise to alert putative terrorists “what not to do at the airport.” Sherri Caudill, the junior flight attendant who had singled Aaron out for failing to acknowledge her and who initiated the irate passenger alert apparently took her training very seriously. On the witness stand at Aaron’s trial she told the court, “We are trained to kill before we are killed!”
The Jameses did not return to Minneapolis for sentencing in October of 2006. By that time, both were suffering from severe anxiety and deteriorating health. Aaron had been treated in a Winnipeg hospital several times for severe chest pains and difficulty breathing. Linda was experiencing recurring, heart-wrenching nightmares.
They sent a letter of explanation to the court that Aaron was not fit to travel for sentencing.
Their lawyer had informed them that if Aaron failed to appear for sentencing, he would be charged with a felony level crime, which meant he could be extradited any time in the future to the U.S. To the James’s knowledge, no new charge has been added, and no sentence was passed in Aaron’s absence.
They’ve exhausted their ability to raise or borrow funds for legal costs - an amount now at about US$40,000. Linda will not be retiring from her job as an office administrator in two years, as was her plan. Aaron is on income assistance, unable to focus on anything but clearing his name so he can return to university and resume a normal life. He wrestles with bouts of fear, anxiety, shame, and anger.
“It’s a strange kind of hell that we’re living in,” Linda James says. “I fall asleep at the supper table and wake in the small hours, wondering how this could have happened to us.”
Lesley Hughes is a Winnipeg-based writer and broadcaster; co-host of ALERT RADIO and Canadian Dimension columnist