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Plantation 9-1-1

Taser the Baby With the Bath Water

As told to Ed Newton 

The Plantation Police Department thought Wesley Christopher was a neglectful dad. So they Tasered his 2-year-old daughter. That´s not a misprint or something from an episode of Reno 9-1-1. It actually happened.

In February of last year, a Broward County Child Protective Services investigator named Nicole Percival staked out Christopher´s home in response to an anonymous report that Christopher routinely left 2-year-old Natalie unsupervised on NW Eighth Court in Plantation.

In fact, on this occasion, he did, the cops say. Percival allegedly saw Christopher leave the house on his bicycle, returning 10 or 15 minutes later with his 6-year-old son, Brandon, whom he´d picked up from school.

By then, Percival had already called the Plantation Police, though responding officers took 40 minutes to get there. Christopher had long since returned; he was sweeping his garage as Percival, her CPS trainee, and three police officers walked up the driveway. Officer Brian Boos accused Christopher of abandoning his daughter. Christopher denied it. In his report, Boos wrote, ¨I explained to the defendant if he continued [to] lie about leaving the child he would be placed under arrest.¨

With Christopher continuing his denials, the officers tried to arrest him. Christopher escaped Boos´ grasp, and in the commotion, both Natalie and Brandon began to wail from inside the house. Christopher went in, with Boos in pursuit, and took Natalie in his arms.

Percival´s trainee asked to take Natalie, but Christopher refused, the police report says. He asked the cops and social workers to wait until his fiancée, the mother of the children, arrived.

They didn´t want to wait. Boos told Christopher he was under arrest. ¨The defendant ignored my talking and stated, The baby doesn´t know you all, you´re not taking her,´¨ Boos reported.

As Percival took the screaming 6-year-old upstairs (presumably to pack some clothes in preparation for placing him in a temporary shelter), police officers surrounded Christopher and tried to pull Natalie out of his arms. When that didn´t work, wrote Boos, ¨I drive-stunned the defendant in his upper back between his shoulder blades.¨

That´s 50,000 volts of electricity. As anyone who´s shuffled across a thick carpet in dry weather knows, human beings are conductors. The shock moved from Christopher (who was shirtless) to Natalie. Predictably, the shock caused Christopher to drop the baby, who bounced off the sofa edge and slammed into the floor.

When Christopher bent down and picked up Natalie, another officer stunned him and again he dropped Natalie on the floor.

Christopher was booked on felony charges of neglect and resisting arrest, but by the time his case finally came to trial, those charges were reduced to a single misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.

The jury needed about 75 minutes to issue its ruling last Friday: not guilty. Surprised?

Christopher couldn´t afford his own attorney in his criminal trial, but public defender Dale Miller delivered particularly when he asked Boos to unsheath his Taser X26 and conduct a demonstration for the jury. Enough crackling electricity came out of the thing to frighten jurors, Miller contends.

Tailpipe bets a six-pack of O´Doul´s against a glass of Everglades water that Christopher will find a private attorney who´s glad to accept his civil suit against the Plantation cops. $$$unPass

It used to be public servants who stole from the public coffers. But then, big government ¨deciders¨ notably Dubya and his younger Florida sibling went big-time into privatization and ¨outsourcing,¨ creating vast new opportunities for private-sector felons. Most recently, there was the case of an employee of a Florida Department of Transportation contractor who was charged in federal court in Fort Lauderdale with embezzling nearly a quarter of a million dollars from taxpayers. Of course, it took a public employee to notice the missing money though it took him two years. (That´s the problem with bureaucrats, Bush & Bush complain. They´re slow.)

Richard Arce, a project manager at FDOT´s Florida Turnpike SunPass Operations Center in Boca Raton, was reviewing accounting records and noticed that, dating back to November 2005, there had been some abnormally large refunds to one account.

A SunPass, as any Turnpike commuter will tell you, is an electronic transmitter that allows drivers to link a credit card to a state account so that they can pay tolls without having to rummage for change or wait in long lines. Occasionally, mistakes are made, people are overcharged, and refunds are made. Five or ten dollars here and there, sure. But $240,000? That´s greedy and, well, foolhardy.

It seems that Sharon M. Taffe, 38, a Jamaican national living in Broward County, had been working as an accounting specialist for the New York-based Faneuil Group for four years. According to court records, in 2003, Taffe was having some financial problems. She fell behind in her fees to her townhouse association, and a civil court ordered a foreclosure sale.

About the same time, Florida´s Turnpike Enterprise gave the Faneuil Group a fat contract for personnel services (more than $360 million over the past five years, according to the state agency). In 2005, Faneuil opened a ¨dedicated customer contact center¨ in Orlando, according to the company´s website, which prominently touts its relationship with Florida´s state government.

According to court records, Taffe admitted to U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Christopher Hersey last month that she´d wired $140,000 in toll revenues to her Bank of America account. She denied taking the other $100,000, but bank records show otherwise. Maybe Taffe was using that fuzzy Halliburton math you hear so much about nowadays. No word yet on her sentence. No Room at the Inn

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