But department Taser logs show the deputies fired their devices for a total of 94 seconds during the encounter.
During the struggle, Mr. Padgett climbed into a patrol car and drove away, according to a news release from the Simpson County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy chased Mr. Padgett to a nearby gas station and fatally shot him as he opened the car door holding a deputy’s rifle.
Ms. Padgett traced her son’s death back to the officers’ excessive Taser use — they fired 17 times in all — which she said terrified him and caused him to flee.
“Seventeen times,” Ms. Padgett said, repeating the phrase over and over after reporters showed her the logs. “Seventeen times.”
Reporting was contributed by Mukta Joshi, Chelsea Long, Justin Mayo, Jerry Mitchell, Steph Quinn and Irene Casado Sanchez. Christina Kelso contributed video production.
About the Analysis
The New York Times and Mississippi Today collected Taser log documents from 36 departments, which were converted into data form by Big Local News at Stanford University. These responses were often incomplete. One department supplied only two months of data, while others omitted some of their weapons or provided corrupt files that could not be processed.
About 108,000 uses of the Tasers since 2020 were extracted from the 1.4 million rows of data logged. Each use represents one instance of pulling the trigger or pressing a button to generate electricity.
Taser logs do not indicate why the weapon was used, and many of these entries represent training sessions and test firings. The most modern Tasers make identifying these easier, and more than 80 percent of them were removed from the analysis. Firings that occurred within an hour of updating the weapon’s time or software, or a burst of short events in a five-minute period, were also removed. This reduced the number of firings by almost half, to 63,000.
This set was collapsed into 44,000 incidents in which one or more Tasers were triggered for at least one second each over the course of an hour. Recorded shocks of less than one second were not included because of the likelihood that they were misfires. Events that would have fallen into multiple incidents were counted in the longest one. Of those, reporters manually reviewed the nearly 1,000 cases that lasted at least 15 seconds. About 400 were either identified by the departments as training and testing, or showed patterns typical of training operations, and were removed. Once the list was edited, the review found 611 incidents that lasted at least 15 seconds.
