A Missouri teen is in critical condition after an Independence police officer used a stun gun on him for not rolling his car window down, which was broken.
17-year-old Bryce Masters is in a medically induced coma due to injuries suffered to his brain. Doctors are cooling his body to try and reduce swelling that may have been caused by knocking his head against the concrete or losing oxygen for a prolonged period of time.
Curtis Martes, Masters’ friend, went outside to welcome him at his house in the 200 block of Southside Boulevard around 3:30 p.m. Sunday, when he saw that a police officer had pulled Masters over.
“The cop went up to the passenger window and was like, ‘hey, roll down the window,’” Martes said. Problem was that Masters couldn’t roll it down. “He doesn’t have the cable that allows the electric window to work,” Martes said.
Independence police say that Masters had an outstanding traffic violation and refused to cooperate with the police officer. Authorities said the officer did what he had to do to protect himself because Masters began to struggle with the officer.
“The driver refused to exit the vehicle. A struggle ensued, a Taser was deployed by the officer. The driver was finally removed from the car. A struggle ensued once he was moved out of the car,” Sgt. Darrell Schmidli said.
Witnesses tell a different account of the scene.
“The cop was like, ‘you want to mess with me,’ and pulled out his Taser and tased him. I thought he shot him. Then he pulled him out of the car, handcuffed him drug him around the car,” witness Michelle Baker said.
Martes said, “He like threw him on the ground and busted his face up. He kept like nudging him with his foot.”
“It looked like he hit his head on the concrete. You could see blood coming out of his mouth. The cop put his foot on his back and moved it back and forth like he was putting a cigarette out and asked him, ‘are you ready to get up now?’ You could tell the kid was going into convulsions,”
