June 4, 2025 • 41 mins
Matt Masters investigates - what happened to his son? Who is to blame here? The answers lead him down a rabbit hole that will change everything.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on Taser Incorporated. So you see this pig go
into a sisterly, were you surprised?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Oh, absolutely, that's not supposed to happen. They said, that's
not supposed to happen, and they just kind of chuckled
and said, no, no, that happens. Okay, why don't we
know about it?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It kind of just matter of fact. It looked at
me like, oh no, he's not on drugs. It's a taser.
Taser caused this.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
According to police, Masters wouldn't cooperate and the officer stunned
him with a taser.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
He resisted arrest.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
What we're told is that police pulled over the driver
because of an outstanding warrant.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
That's when all the questions really started. For me.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I can't I can't explain how how my brain is
fucking works now. I mean, it's just like every day
he is a new challenge in it. I still figure.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Rice Masters doesn't like to talk about what happened to him.
It's too painful. So the handful of times we've talked
about it since I met him ten years ago, this
is how we do it, driving around back roads on
the outskirts of Kansas City, driving helps him think.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
I'm gonna get up a little gas in this because
I don't know how.
Speaker 6 (01:40):
Good the.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Sun's going down and the Missouri sky seems pink forever.
Rice is in his late twenties, now a grown up.
His injury forced him to find a new road. What
do you really want people to know about you? And
who who Bryce Masters was before all this happened.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I mean, I was just a kid. I was a good,
hearty kid. I I was actually an anti bully. Like
I'm a good guy. I love my family and I'm good.
I'm good to people. I'm even even random people. You know,
if if I see someone at the grocery store who
needs a couple of bucks for their for their bread.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Or you know, all, hey, I got it.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
You know, just that part of me has never changed,
but that there's so many things about me, you know
that I just wasn't me before, Like I was never
a truly angry person and that and sometimes I can
be really angry. It's hard to deal with that because
that's not who I actually am, but it's it's part
(02:50):
of who I become, and not because I wanted it
to be. But because of this this injury that you
screwed my life up.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
This is absolute. Season one, Taser incorporated a story about
unchecked power. I'm Nick Beredini. Episode four, that's capture Bryce's
(04:02):
Masters lay still in his hospital bed when his eyes
broke free and started to scan the room. He doesn't
remember any of those first moments, but his parents do.
Mad Stacy Masters waited for three exhausting days for any
sign that their son would live.
Speaker 7 (04:19):
We're coming through the door and I'm like, Matt, I
think he's awake. And that's when he heard my voice
and he he recognized us.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
When he finally woke up, he panicked.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
He heard my voice and he like kind of lunged forward.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Nurses had to tie Bryce's arms to the bed after
he tried to rip out the breathing tube stuck down
his throat. He was bewildered, like he was trying to escape.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
They told us like, look, this is the hardest part
because he needs to breathe on his own without the machine.
But stay innovated for thirty minutes and you're gonna have
to talk him through that. And he was just like
he kept trying to pull the tube out of his throat,
and I remember just big tears running down his face.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Finally, nurses pulled out the breathing tube. Bryce was in
a lot of pain. He was confused, but he was
back from the dead.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
He didn't have a very good memory, Like we would
tell him the story, I mean twenty minutes thirty minutes later,
Why am I here? What the fuck happened to me?
I mean like we just told you. Don't you remember
no what you know? He didn't remember anything, and like,
why why am I here? What happened? And it was like,
(05:44):
you know, hey, this is what happened. You got stopped
by a cop and you got taste. And he's like
look at you, like what, Like, what the fuck are
you talking about?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Bryce's face was swollen. Doctors suspected his jaw had been
dislocated and popped back into place.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He had a big contusion on his chin, and I
remember him picking up the mirror and he's like, what
the fuck happened to my face? You know? And we
were like, yeah, that's that what happened when the cop
did this. And he's like what, He's like, what did
I do? You know? And we're like we don't know,
you know, I don't know. We don't know what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Bryce kept pressing his tongue against his lips. He said
it felt raw, his teeth felt crushed. Stacy and Matt
moved in for a closer look.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
And he's like spitting it out, and we're like looking
at it, and we're like, what is that?
Speaker 1 (06:43):
One by one he started to spit pieces of his
teeth into Stacy's hand. At least three were sheared in
half and several others badly chipped, and Stacy were so
wrapped up in Bryce's coma those first three days that
(07:04):
they hadn't focused on the details of why he was
in a coma, But when Bryce started to spit out
pieces of his teeth, they grabbed their attention. Why was
he tased? What happened to his teeth?
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That was just a whole nother revelation, Like this is
way more fucked up than we thought.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It turns out the FBI was interested too. Within hours
of the incident, agents started investigating whether the cop who
pulled Bryce over and tasered him violated his civil rights,
and soon after Bryce woke up from his coma, they
came to the hospital to see him.
Speaker 7 (07:40):
But I'm thinking, you know, we're kind of in the
middle of something right now, maybe this can wait a
couple of days, but they wouldn't wait. They were like,
we understand, but we still want to talk right now.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Over the course of several visits, the FBI agents took
pictures of Bryce's messed up face, his broken teeth, and
the two little red bumps that showed where he'd been
tasered on his chest. The agents knew exactly where to
look for Bryce's injuries, to the point that Matt and
Stacy got the sense that the FBI knew something they didn't,
and it was true. The agents told them they knew
(08:13):
what happened that day. There was video of the entire incident.
Matt and Stacy wanted to know when could they see it?
What did Runnels do to Bryce? But also had Bryce
done something to Runnels? Not even Bryce could answer that question.
(08:36):
Do you remember anything at all about the Sunday that
you were tased and pulled over?
Speaker 5 (08:42):
I remember I went to them all and brought bought
a brand new pair of shoes that when I woke
up I didn't like anymore. But that's pretty much it.
I don't even remember what happened earlier in the day.
It was a really really weird thing. The only thing
imber just getting no shoes, and then I had him
in my trunk and I was gonna go show Curtis.
(09:05):
That's all I remember.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Matt and Stacy went home from the hospital with two
big goals. The first was to do everything in their
power to help Bryce heal. The second was to figure
out what the hell happened. Stacey took the lead on
Bryce's recovery. Doctors told her he only had about two
months to try to fix the brain damage that could
still be healed. He was going to rehab five days
(09:57):
a week, eight hours a day.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
It was really really hard just to get him in
the car. Like, you do not understand what he put
me through.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Bryce had been a sweet, kind kid. Now he unleashed
an anger Stacy had never seen before.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
I mean, he beat the dash of my car so
hard I thought he was going to blow the airbag.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
He had dramatic mood swings and was in a deep depression,
and he suffered from terrible insomnia.
Speaker 7 (10:28):
The moodiness, it was unbearable. He was mean and bigger
than me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Bryce looked like her son, He sounded like her son,
but it was someone new inside. A familiar body.
Speaker 7 (10:43):
And when we would talk about things that we would
assume he would be familiar with. I started to pick
up on he would kind of fake it. You could
just tell in his face that he was not remembering
this childhood memory, which is awful. A memory is pretty important.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
You know, when Bryce saw the new pair of sneakers
he'd bought the same day he was taste, he asked
his mom who bought him those ugly ass shoes. At
Thanksgiving dinner that year, he asked Stacy to make his
favorite dessert, pecan bars. He took a few bites and
apologized he just didn't like it anymore.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
And this is what he told me. He wanted to
just wake up and be like he was before. And
he remembered having a memory. He remembered not having a
limp or dragging his leg. He remembered the abilities that
he had, but he it was like he just didn't
(11:48):
have access to them anymore. Like that's the unfortunate part
about having a brain injury, is you remember being good
at math, but now when you go to make change,
you can't do it.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Bryce once told me that he didn't think he was
the kind of person to resist arrest or threaten a cob,
but he couldn't know for sure.
Speaker 7 (12:20):
That was a very emotional and internal battle for him
because he couldn't just tell himself you didn't do anything wrong,
because he didn't remember what he did or didn't do.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
While Stacey was focused on Bryce's recovery, Matt went looking
for answers. His first move was to figure out if
Runnelds had pulled Bryce over because of a warrant.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
He made a few calls, a couple buddies on the
apartment rain him through, and criminal record checked him, and
you know he's like, Nanga, I don't fucking warrant. No,
He's clean.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
There was a warrant out for the Grand Priest's license
plate when Runnelds pulled Bryce over, but it was for
a woman who committed a traffic violation from over one
hundred miles away. There was a typo in the system.
It was corrected after the stop. In his statement explaining
why he stopped Bryce, Runnels claimed he pulled the car
over because it had darkly tinted windows and that after
(13:13):
he stopped Bryce, he detected an odor of marijuana coming
from inside the vehicle.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
So then that just started this whole other doubt, you know,
in my mind of like what's okay, what's really going on?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Matt started to suspect that Runnels was covering his ass.
The warrant wouldn't have been enough to justify stopping Bryce,
so when Matt saw the statement, he thought Runnels changed
his reason for pulling Bryce over to darkly tinted windows
and then marijuana smell, which is subjective. Matt at Seene
cops do this kind of thing. Before he told the
(13:50):
FBI agents, he thought Runnels was working the case backwards,
trying to justify a stop after it happened. Runnels also
wrote that Bryce fused his commands and resisted arrest, which
justified his use of the taser. So Matt became consumed
with doubt. He obsessed over what everyone else thought. He
(14:11):
watched every news story, and even worse, he read the
opinions of strangers on social media and in online comments.
One comment on Facebook says the kid was probably a thug,
he probably broke the law, and another blames Matt directly.
His dad should have raised a more respectful son.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
A lot of people tried to make Bryce out to
be this piece of shit kid that, you know, his
parents taught him not to respect law enforcement, and look
what happened to him. Fuck him, you know, that's what should.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Have happened to him. The comments got to Matt not
because he was angry at them. Matt was afraid they
were right. Cops don't just taze people for no reason.
And then there was another big mystery. Matt was he
unsure about why Ronald's tasered his son, but he was
(15:03):
equally unsure about what doctor Augustin, Rice's surgeon in the
trauma unit told him. Could the taser really stop Bryce's heart?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
At first, it was kind of like denial, like, yeah,
that's not like that can't happen, you know. And then
I just started researching on my own, googling taser stuff
and looking at videos and looking up court cases and
like things that had happened around the country. And I
first saw the Stanley Harlan incident that had happened in Mobley, Missouri.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Caught my Stanley Harlan, the kid who was my age
when he was tasered in front of his house, the
same case that caught my eye too six years before
Matt started reading about him.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
I was like totally floored that that was even possible.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Matt had heard news reports about people dying from tasers before,
but always thought it was the media or act just
out to get cops. He went back to the training
that taught him the taser was safe. If people were dying,
it was because they were on drugs, on a ledge,
or fighting the police, excited delirium, et cetera. But after
(16:14):
Matt learned about Stanley Harlan, he began to read other
news articles, lots of them. Now with his mind open
to the idea that the taser could cause harm, he
read more stories of people who were shot by tasers
in the chest.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
There was a kid named Darryl Turner that had I
don't know what year Daryl died two thousand and eight.
So there's a video of Darryl Turner and he got
tased and died.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And suddenly Matt was seeing things from a completely different perspective.
He started collecting the news articles and then actually looking
up the lawsuits the articles were pointing to against Taser International,
depositions in court filings alleging the company knew tasers caused
cardiac arrest, so he began to print those out too.
(17:01):
He put his pages in a brown accordion folder, and
each day it.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Got thicker, and I would say between like September fourteen,
like in the December is when I really went down
this rabbit hole and was coming across all this stuff,
and I'm just like, why don't cops know any of
this stuff? Like, if you knew this, you wouldn't use
this thing. How the fuck is this even going on.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
That's when Matt started to read studies he'd never heard
about before, ones that completely contradicted the studies he was
familiar with from taser training. These studies clearly showed the
taser's electric current could override someone's regular heartbeat like a
pacemaker gone haywire, and speed it up to rapid rates.
To rapid sometimes, like in his son's case, it could
(17:53):
lead to a cardiac arrest. Doctors called it cardiac capture
and hit Matt. This was the world where doctor Augustin lived.
In this world, the taser could cause a cardiac arrest
wasn't some myth, It was science. Why wasn't it seen
as reality? In Matt's world? Cops were the ones using
(18:16):
this weapon, and yet the only reason he was learning
about the danger was because his own son got hurt.
Even some of the company's studies were quietly admitting that
Taser could affect the heart. Matt found one in a
medical journal from twenty ten, published four years before Bryce
was tasered. The study was run by doctor Jeff Hoe,
(18:39):
Taser International's medical director at the time. He was testing
a new Taser model. It was a slightly less powerful
weapon than the X twenty six, and Hoe was pretty
sure it was ready for sales. But one of the
people observing the test with Taser's doctors was a paramedic
turned cop, a guy who was getting more and more
concerned about what he was being behind closed doors during
(19:01):
pig tests. Oakland PDS Mike Leonesio he was still accepting
invitations to Taser's tests, and some of the tests were
not on pigs, they were on human beings. Mike remembers
they started this test during the company's annual.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Conference, and I mean it was a big fanfare, you know, lights,
and they had the countdown clock.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
The conference was at a resort in Arizona and they
were launching the new Taser X three. Mike says they
had set up a lab and a trailer in the
parking lot.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
They were asking for human volunteers, and you know, you've
got a room of six hundred, eight hundred cops and
they would give you a little perk, so like if
you signed up, they would give you a T shirt,
a lab rat T shirt.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
It actually had a rat on a lab ren Mike says.
Doctor Hoe hooked each volunteer up to an ultrasound machine
to get an accurate measure of their heart rhythm. During
the taser shot. Mike was hanging out by the medical equipment.
He walked does The first few guys got zapped without issue.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
So then we get to a sheriff's deputy sergeant from Texas.
So he comes and he's not a real big guy,
and he comes in and they run him through all
the paces and they do the pre medical thing and
get him behind the screen and they shoot him with
the thing, and then they take him over and they
lay him down, hook him all up and they hit
him and they get cardiac captured.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
The electric current from this new taser model captured the
deputy's normal heartbeat and sped it up again like a
revd up pacemaker.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I remember Hoe was standing there and I remember looking
at the screen, and I said, that's capture.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Mike had seen the taser effect the heart and pig testing,
but this was a human during a controlled experiment designed
to be as safe as possible.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The deputy was fine. I mean, he didn't have any
negative effects, he wasn't unconscious, he didn't do anything. I mean,
it was really a couple of seconds maybe, but it
was clearly capture.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
That was the thing. Cardiac capture wasn't a death sentence.
Previous tests and pigs had shown that most of the
time when the taser caused capture, the pig's hearts went
back to normal when the shock was over. But this
was the first human test on this new model, and
not even ten volunteers in someone's heart got captured. Mike
(21:29):
told me that doctor Host shut down the test. A
few Taser employees hopped in a car and took the
new prototype back to headquarters.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Maybe a couple of hours went by, and the technical
guys come back and I said, wait a minute, hold
on a minute. We just saw what happened here. You're
going to start up again. And they said, oh, yeah,
I don't know. We fixed the problem. And I said,
what do you mean, you fix the problem, and these
are the exact words.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
I said, well, we tweaked it.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I said, you tweaked what he says, we took the
weapon and we tweaked it. It's fine now. And I said, well,
what is a tweak What does that mean? And that's
all they would say is we tweaked it. It's fine,
It's okay now.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Months later, doctor Hoe was questioned about the incident under
oath and he said he didn't know what they did
to tweak it either. At the time, Mike remembers he
couldn't believe they were going forward with the test.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
I said, you know, you guys are downplaying this thing,
and you know, everything's fine. And granted, I'm glad there's
nothing wrong with the deputy. I'm glad that it was
just you know, we saw it was a couple of seconds.
No big Well, I'm not going to say no big deal,
because any time you're affecting the heart like that, it
is it is a big deal. But the fact that
they just wouldn't tell me what they did, what was wrong,
(22:49):
how they fixed it, that was a little disturbing. So
I went home still concerned.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Mike says he kept bringing up the incident with doctor
Hoe and the other scientists running the test, and at.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
First their response was no, no, this was an aberration.
This is like you know, statistically, it's not significant, it's
not relevant. I said, look, if you don't report this
in your study, then I'm going to report it. So
they said, fine, all right, we'll make sure that it's
in there, and I said, okay.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Five years later, Matt Masters was printing documents off the
Internet and putting them in his folder. That's when he
saw training bulletin fifteen, issued by Taser International on September thirtieth,
two thousand and nine, about three months after the human test.
Mike saw Matt read the eighteen page document and his
jaw dropped Underneath a bullet point labeled cardiac. He read
(23:51):
the risk of an adverse cardiac event related to a
Taser ECD discharge is deemed to be extremely low. This
meant that five years before Timothy Runnels tasered Bryce, Taser
International told cops the taser could affect the heart, but
at least in Matt's case, he'd never heard it before.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Nobody ever told us any of this when I first
got trained, and I want to say around two thousand
and four ish. You know, fast forward to twenty fourteen,
ten years later, there was no change in what I
was trained to know. Ford to twenty.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Fourteen, all cops got basically the same training on tasers.
If Matt didn't know a taser could cause cardiac arrest,
why would the guy who shot his son in the
chest with a taser? No, So Matt was wondering if
(24:50):
this was just a tragic mistake. What if Bryce resisted
arrest and Runalds thought he was doing the right thing.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And then I started kind of doubt my and really thinking, well,
maybe maybe he really didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So six months after Timothy Runnells tase Bryce, Matt and
Stacy were surprised to learn that Runnels was going to
be criminally charged. It's rare officers are given lots of
leeway through the objectively reasonable standard established by the Supreme Court. Basically,
if another cop in the same circumstances would make the
same choice, it's considered reasonable. There's no official stat but
(25:31):
nonprofits estimate less than one percent of officers are prosecuted
for excessive force. In Runnel's case, there were four charges.
Matt read through each of them, but he didn't find
any details about what actually happened that day or what
Bryce did to deserve being tasered. Paul It said was
(25:51):
that Runnels continuously tasered Bryce and that he deliberately dropped
Bryce on his face. Runnels decided to take a plea deal.
He pled guilty, but only to one charge. He would
only admit that he deliberately dropped Bryce on his face.
Prosecutors dropped the other three charges. When Matt, Stacey and
(26:20):
Bryce made their way to the federal courthouse in downtown
Kansas City in September of twenty fifteen, they sat on
the right side of the courtroom. A judge called Timothy
Runnels to the stand and he pled guilty to the
one remaining charge, deliberately dropping Bryce's face first on the ground.
The hearing lasted less than thirty minutes. Runnels was going
(26:43):
to go to prison for four years. He'd already lost
his job, but if he hadn't dropped Bryce on his
face after tasering him, he might still be a cop.
The hearing was paid ful for Matt, Stacey and Bryce,
but there were no surprises. It was what happened after
(27:06):
that they remember most. As they were getting up to leave.
The assistant US attorney invited them into a conference room
and asked if they wanted to see the dashcam footage.
It had been almost one year to the day since
Bryce was tasered, a year of wondering what really happened.
Finally they wouldn't have to wonder anymore. The video opens.
(28:08):
The camera shows what Runnel sees when he starts to
follow Bryce in his car. It is a gorgeous late
summer day. Suburban lawns and green oak trees pass by
in the frame. Bryce's gray Pontiac Grand Prix stays in
focus for about twenty seconds before Runnels flicks on his siren.
Bryce pulls over in front of his friend Curtis's.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
House outside of man and a silver Pontiac.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
It's like one I.
Speaker 7 (28:34):
He's realizing his King Henry one.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Runnels gets out of his cruiser and crosses the screen,
walking toward Bryce's passenger side door. Roll all the way down,
that's Runnell's voice.
Speaker 6 (28:46):
Okay, hey, you got roll the way down, but.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The passenger window is broken. Bryce asks, you can't hear me.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Hear me roll it all the way down. I can
heave it. Roll it all the way down for what.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Donalds crosses the frame again, marching towards Bryce's driver's side door.
Bryce tries to explain that his window doesn't roll down,
just one opens.
Speaker 7 (29:10):
Yeah, what he's doing?
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Get out, pullet out down.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Runnels opens Bryce's door, But what out?
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Hey, minor arrest?
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Get out, mine arrest out.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
I'm gonna pull you, don't.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
He opens the door and says I'm gonna pull you
out if you don't get out. Bryce is doing what
his parents told him to do. If a cop asks
you to get out of a car, you should ask why.
But Runnalds won't answer. He reaches into the car and
starts to pull Bryce out by the collar of his shirt,
but Bryce grabs the steering wheel and Runnelds loses his grip.
(29:47):
Get out.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
Do you really want to get page right in your middle?
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Get your ass out and out. Runnelds tries to pull
Bryce out one more time.
Speaker 7 (29:56):
I haven't done anything off.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I haven't done anything off, sir.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
What am I under arrest?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah? Am I under arrest?
Speaker 7 (30:03):
Mind the red line the wret you.
Speaker 6 (30:06):
Man, You're under arrest for what?
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:08):
For what? Ronald steps back about two feet and pulls
out his taser. He points it at Bryce.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
All right, find Fucky, just get out out out right now,
out of the car.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
You can hear the familiar rhythmic sound of the taser.
In the room where Matt and Stacy are watching the
dash can video for the first time, they're horrified. Bryce
steps out of the driver door, his arms tense and
stiff at his side as the taser's electric current pulses
through his body at nineteen times a second.
Speaker 6 (30:43):
Okay's the appointment on the ground, under the car, on
the ground, on the ground. Ah, don'd you hands on
your back?
Speaker 2 (30:56):
What about?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Bryce is not moving on the screen as run handcuffs
h the click click, click, still ticking. Matt has no
idea that Bryce had been tased for so long. In
the conference room where he and his family are watching,
Matt stands up and screams of the TV. Let off
the goddamn trigger. Finally, after about twenty seconds, it stops.
(31:22):
A taser cycle only lasts for five seconds. This was
the moment when Matt first understood that Bryce had been
tased more than once, that Runnels had held down on
the trigger, tasering Bryce for at least twenty seconds straight.
(31:43):
In the video, Runnel's yanks Bryce up by his arms.
He drags him behind Bryce's car toward the curb, and
he throws Bryce handcuffed and in cardiac arrest, on his face.
(32:08):
His chin hits the curb. This is the moment Bryce's
teeth shattered. Runnels starts going through Bryce's pockets. You don't
like to play by the rules.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Runnels puts his foot on Bryce's back and stands over him.
Right lerk it up.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
I don't play games.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
But Bryce is still laying on his chest, handcuffed, his
face pressed against the curb. A minute thirty seconds have
now passed since Ronald's first taste. Bryce Runnelds calls an ambulance.
It's protocol for independence, PD.
Speaker 7 (32:46):
You ready to sit up now?
Speaker 6 (32:49):
I've been tased a dozen times. Doesn't act like that.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Bryce isn't moving. Six minutes after Runnald's first taste, ice
paramedics arrive.
Speaker 7 (33:02):
He's trying to Blue Wise to look.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
You know, he's hurt of blue.
Speaker 6 (33:05):
You bring that on?
Speaker 5 (33:07):
Oh wow, man, a bull stickle Marguts starts call me that.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
About seven minutes after Runnel's first tase Bryce, paramedics shock
Bryce's heart with an automated defibrillator. About fifteen minutes after
Runnel's taste, Bryce, Matt, and Stacy arrive watching in the
conference room. They can't see themselves on the video, but
(33:35):
they can hear each other shouting off screen for a
fucking dance, jack of you the fuck that. It's hard
to see on the dash video, but if you look closely,
there's a small bag of marijuana on the roof of
(33:56):
Bryce's car.
Speaker 7 (33:58):
Right, You're right right.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Paramedics wheeled Bryce on a stretcher across the screen. Stacy
follows behind. She can't. Stacy stands next to Bryce's car,
her hands pressed to her cheeks, and watches as paramedics
lift Bryce into an ambulance. The video ends.
Speaker 7 (34:27):
And I had really prepared myself to see something, some
sort of threatening behavior, whether he was going to flick
a cigarette out of the you know, or something that
could be perceived as threatening, or words, or maybe some
disrespectful dialogue between the two of them or something. Bryce
(34:50):
didn't do anything, and I just couldn't believe it. I
just couldn't believe what I saw. What did he do?
That's what I didn't see was what was so shocking
to me, aside from how this man that did this
(35:10):
to Bryce just treated him like an animal, I mean
worse than an animal. He didn't deserve this. Somewhere along
the lines, I had placed a little bit of preparedness
that he did something and he didn't.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I'm mad at myself because I doubted Bryce. You know,
I did doubt Bryce. I doubted Bryce woman. I doubted
Timothy Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Matt told me about how a couple months later he
attended an annual in service training on tasers, kind of
like an annual refresher course for the Kansas City PD.
There would go over any changes in case law or
new information from the previous year. Matt thought Bryce's case
would come up during the session. You can imagine what
an emotional hurdle this was for Matt, but he gathered
(36:03):
all his courage. He wanted to make one concise point.
If cops were going to shoot people in the chest,
they needed to know that taser might kill someone. He
described how he sat in the back of the room
and watched patiently as the instructor went over the same
talking points he'd always heard. Be careful shooting people who
(36:25):
could fall off a ledge or might be close to
something flammable like gasoline. One point was different from when
he was first trained, don't use tasers on people who
are simply arguing with you. But the moment, Matt says
he was waiting for, when they would go over what
happened to Bryce and bring up the warning, the one
that warned officers there was a chance the taser could
(36:47):
cause cardiac arrest, the one in that eighteen page bulletin
Matt was keeping in his folder, the one Taser International
released five years before his own kid was nearly killed.
That warning never came up.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
That's what caught me off guards because I'm like, Okay,
my son just got tas and wining cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
It felt like a lie biomission, you know.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I'm just like dying inside, like whoa bro, Like seriously,
like you're gonna fucking sit here and say that there's
no cardiac risk.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
According to the Kansas City Police Department, Taser International's eighteen
page bulletin did make it into the department's training when
it was first announced, but they decided that it wasn't
relevant enough to repeat every year. Sitting in the back
of that training, Matt told me that he thought about Bryce.
He thought about how it could be any one of
(37:42):
them in that room tasing some kid in the chest,
causing a cardiac arrest. He told me. He raised his hand.
He pointed out that the risks of cardiac arrest were
very real. Hell, they were personal.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, and you're sitting there going, hey, my kid got
tays and went in cardiac arrest. Like, if you need
somebody to talk to, come talk to this.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Guy, right, Matt says. The instructor told him in front
of the entire class that he was simply teaching the
slides that Taser International provided. Matt warned the other cops
in the room they weren't getting the full story, but
they looked at him like he was crazy, and.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
It's just basically like a middle finger to me. And
I was just kind of like, Okay, well I see
where this is. You know, nobody's going to listen.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
That Taser training clarified a lot for Matt. That's where
he changed his mind about who was to blame for what. Yes,
Timothy Runnels was responsible for being cruel and brutal, and
he was going to prison for it. But what happened
to Bryce wasn't just on runnels. Taser International was responsible
for misleading hundreds of thousands of cops all over the world,
(38:56):
making them think they had a weapon that couldn't kill. Now,
Matt decided Taser International was responsible for Bryce's brain damage
and he wanted to make them pay next time. On
(39:22):
Absolute Season one Taser Incorporated.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
My focus really, I was like, let's go after Taser.
Let's go after Taser, Mashal, That's the big one.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
I want to start by addressing a couple of questions
we've been receiving over email. The first one is our
chest hits with the Taser dangerous and the answer to
that is definitively no.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
This is really going to be hard to prove that
the Taser did this. The company that makes these things
is going to fight you.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Absolute Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good
in association with Signal Company Number One. Be sure to
follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and threads at Lava
for Good. Follow me at Nick Beredini on Instagram and Twitter.
Taser Incorporated is written and produced by me Nick Beredini.
Our executive producers are Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis.
(40:36):
Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Paul is our producer.
Hannah Biel is our writer and producer. Joe Plored is
our sound designer. Music composed and produced by Alexis Quadrado
at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Mariann mckune is our editor.
Fact checking by Dania Suleiman. Jeff Cliburn is our head
of marketing and Operations. Our social media director is East
(40:59):
Marine Guardama, our social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and
our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional reporting by Matt Stroud.
Previously on Taser Incorporated. So you see this pig go
into a sisterly, were you surprised?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Oh, absolutely, that's not supposed to happen. They said, that's
not supposed to happen, and they just kind of chuckled
and said, no, no, that happens. Okay, why don't we
know about it?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It kind of just matter of fact. It looked at
me like, oh no, he's not on drugs. It's a taser.
Taser caused this.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
According to police, Masters wouldn't cooperate and the officer stunned
him with a taser.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
He resisted arrest.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
What we're told is that police pulled over the driver
because of an outstanding warrant.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
That's when all the questions really started. For me.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I can't I can't explain how how my brain is
fucking works now. I mean, it's just like every day
he is a new challenge in it. I still figure.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Rice Masters doesn't like to talk about what happened to him.
It's too painful. So the handful of times we've talked
about it since I met him ten years ago, this
is how we do it, driving around back roads on
the outskirts of Kansas City, driving helps him think.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
I'm gonna get up a little gas in this because
I don't know how.
Speaker 6 (01:40):
Good the.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Sun's going down and the Missouri sky seems pink forever.
Rice is in his late twenties, now a grown up.
His injury forced him to find a new road. What
do you really want people to know about you? And
who who Bryce Masters was before all this happened.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I mean, I was just a kid. I was a good,
hearty kid. I I was actually an anti bully. Like
I'm a good guy. I love my family and I'm good.
I'm good to people. I'm even even random people. You know,
if if I see someone at the grocery store who
needs a couple of bucks for their for their bread.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Or you know, all, hey, I got it.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
You know, just that part of me has never changed,
but that there's so many things about me, you know
that I just wasn't me before, Like I was never
a truly angry person and that and sometimes I can
be really angry. It's hard to deal with that because
that's not who I actually am, but it's it's part
(02:50):
of who I become, and not because I wanted it
to be. But because of this this injury that you
screwed my life up.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
This is absolute. Season one, Taser incorporated a story about
unchecked power. I'm Nick Beredini. Episode four, that's capture Bryce's
(04:02):
Masters lay still in his hospital bed when his eyes
broke free and started to scan the room. He doesn't
remember any of those first moments, but his parents do.
Mad Stacy Masters waited for three exhausting days for any
sign that their son would live.
Speaker 7 (04:19):
We're coming through the door and I'm like, Matt, I
think he's awake. And that's when he heard my voice
and he he recognized us.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
When he finally woke up, he panicked.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
He heard my voice and he like kind of lunged forward.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Nurses had to tie Bryce's arms to the bed after
he tried to rip out the breathing tube stuck down
his throat. He was bewildered, like he was trying to escape.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
They told us like, look, this is the hardest part
because he needs to breathe on his own without the machine.
But stay innovated for thirty minutes and you're gonna have
to talk him through that. And he was just like
he kept trying to pull the tube out of his throat,
and I remember just big tears running down his face.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Finally, nurses pulled out the breathing tube. Bryce was in
a lot of pain. He was confused, but he was
back from the dead.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
He didn't have a very good memory, Like we would
tell him the story, I mean twenty minutes thirty minutes later,
Why am I here? What the fuck happened to me?
I mean like we just told you. Don't you remember
no what you know? He didn't remember anything, and like,
why why am I here? What happened? And it was like,
(05:44):
you know, hey, this is what happened. You got stopped
by a cop and you got taste. And he's like
look at you, like what, Like, what the fuck are
you talking about?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Bryce's face was swollen. Doctors suspected his jaw had been
dislocated and popped back into place.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He had a big contusion on his chin, and I
remember him picking up the mirror and he's like, what
the fuck happened to my face? You know? And we
were like, yeah, that's that what happened when the cop
did this. And he's like what, He's like, what did
I do? You know? And we're like we don't know,
you know, I don't know. We don't know what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Bryce kept pressing his tongue against his lips. He said
it felt raw, his teeth felt crushed. Stacy and Matt
moved in for a closer look.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
And he's like spitting it out, and we're like looking
at it, and we're like, what is that?
Speaker 1 (06:43):
One by one he started to spit pieces of his
teeth into Stacy's hand. At least three were sheared in
half and several others badly chipped, and Stacy were so
wrapped up in Bryce's coma those first three days that
(07:04):
they hadn't focused on the details of why he was
in a coma, But when Bryce started to spit out
pieces of his teeth, they grabbed their attention. Why was
he tased? What happened to his teeth?
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That was just a whole nother revelation, Like this is
way more fucked up than we thought.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It turns out the FBI was interested too. Within hours
of the incident, agents started investigating whether the cop who
pulled Bryce over and tasered him violated his civil rights,
and soon after Bryce woke up from his coma, they
came to the hospital to see him.
Speaker 7 (07:40):
But I'm thinking, you know, we're kind of in the
middle of something right now, maybe this can wait a
couple of days, but they wouldn't wait. They were like,
we understand, but we still want to talk right now.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Over the course of several visits, the FBI agents took
pictures of Bryce's messed up face, his broken teeth, and
the two little red bumps that showed where he'd been
tasered on his chest. The agents knew exactly where to
look for Bryce's injuries, to the point that Matt and
Stacy got the sense that the FBI knew something they didn't,
and it was true. The agents told them they knew
(08:13):
what happened that day. There was video of the entire incident.
Matt and Stacy wanted to know when could they see it?
What did Runnels do to Bryce? But also had Bryce
done something to Runnels? Not even Bryce could answer that question.
(08:36):
Do you remember anything at all about the Sunday that
you were tased and pulled over?
Speaker 5 (08:42):
I remember I went to them all and brought bought
a brand new pair of shoes that when I woke
up I didn't like anymore. But that's pretty much it.
I don't even remember what happened earlier in the day.
It was a really really weird thing. The only thing
imber just getting no shoes, and then I had him
in my trunk and I was gonna go show Curtis.
(09:05):
That's all I remember.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Matt and Stacy went home from the hospital with two
big goals. The first was to do everything in their
power to help Bryce heal. The second was to figure
out what the hell happened. Stacey took the lead on
Bryce's recovery. Doctors told her he only had about two
months to try to fix the brain damage that could
still be healed. He was going to rehab five days
(09:57):
a week, eight hours a day.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
It was really really hard just to get him in
the car. Like, you do not understand what he put
me through.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Bryce had been a sweet, kind kid. Now he unleashed
an anger Stacy had never seen before.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
I mean, he beat the dash of my car so
hard I thought he was going to blow the airbag.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
He had dramatic mood swings and was in a deep depression,
and he suffered from terrible insomnia.
Speaker 7 (10:28):
The moodiness, it was unbearable. He was mean and bigger
than me.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Bryce looked like her son, He sounded like her son,
but it was someone new inside. A familiar body.
Speaker 7 (10:43):
And when we would talk about things that we would
assume he would be familiar with. I started to pick
up on he would kind of fake it. You could
just tell in his face that he was not remembering
this childhood memory, which is awful. A memory is pretty important.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
You know, when Bryce saw the new pair of sneakers
he'd bought the same day he was taste, he asked
his mom who bought him those ugly ass shoes. At
Thanksgiving dinner that year, he asked Stacy to make his
favorite dessert, pecan bars. He took a few bites and
apologized he just didn't like it anymore.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
And this is what he told me. He wanted to
just wake up and be like he was before. And
he remembered having a memory. He remembered not having a
limp or dragging his leg. He remembered the abilities that
he had, but he it was like he just didn't
(11:48):
have access to them anymore. Like that's the unfortunate part
about having a brain injury, is you remember being good
at math, but now when you go to make change,
you can't do it.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Bryce once told me that he didn't think he was
the kind of person to resist arrest or threaten a cob,
but he couldn't know for sure.
Speaker 7 (12:20):
That was a very emotional and internal battle for him
because he couldn't just tell himself you didn't do anything wrong,
because he didn't remember what he did or didn't do.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
While Stacey was focused on Bryce's recovery, Matt went looking
for answers. His first move was to figure out if
Runnelds had pulled Bryce over because of a warrant.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
He made a few calls, a couple buddies on the
apartment rain him through, and criminal record checked him, and
you know he's like, Nanga, I don't fucking warrant. No,
He's clean.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
There was a warrant out for the Grand Priest's license
plate when Runnelds pulled Bryce over, but it was for
a woman who committed a traffic violation from over one
hundred miles away. There was a typo in the system.
It was corrected after the stop. In his statement explaining
why he stopped Bryce, Runnels claimed he pulled the car
over because it had darkly tinted windows and that after
(13:13):
he stopped Bryce, he detected an odor of marijuana coming
from inside the vehicle.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
So then that just started this whole other doubt, you know,
in my mind of like what's okay, what's really going on?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Matt started to suspect that Runnels was covering his ass.
The warrant wouldn't have been enough to justify stopping Bryce,
so when Matt saw the statement, he thought Runnels changed
his reason for pulling Bryce over to darkly tinted windows
and then marijuana smell, which is subjective. Matt at Seene
cops do this kind of thing. Before he told the
(13:50):
FBI agents, he thought Runnels was working the case backwards,
trying to justify a stop after it happened. Runnels also
wrote that Bryce fused his commands and resisted arrest, which
justified his use of the taser. So Matt became consumed
with doubt. He obsessed over what everyone else thought. He
(14:11):
watched every news story, and even worse, he read the
opinions of strangers on social media and in online comments.
One comment on Facebook says the kid was probably a thug,
he probably broke the law, and another blames Matt directly.
His dad should have raised a more respectful son.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
A lot of people tried to make Bryce out to
be this piece of shit kid that, you know, his
parents taught him not to respect law enforcement, and look
what happened to him. Fuck him, you know, that's what should.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Have happened to him. The comments got to Matt not
because he was angry at them. Matt was afraid they
were right. Cops don't just taze people for no reason.
And then there was another big mystery. Matt was he
unsure about why Ronald's tasered his son, but he was
(15:03):
equally unsure about what doctor Augustin, Rice's surgeon in the
trauma unit told him. Could the taser really stop Bryce's heart?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
At first, it was kind of like denial, like, yeah,
that's not like that can't happen, you know. And then
I just started researching on my own, googling taser stuff
and looking at videos and looking up court cases and
like things that had happened around the country. And I
first saw the Stanley Harlan incident that had happened in Mobley, Missouri.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Caught my Stanley Harlan, the kid who was my age
when he was tasered in front of his house, the
same case that caught my eye too six years before
Matt started reading about him.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
I was like totally floored that that was even possible.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Matt had heard news reports about people dying from tasers before,
but always thought it was the media or act just
out to get cops. He went back to the training
that taught him the taser was safe. If people were dying,
it was because they were on drugs, on a ledge,
or fighting the police, excited delirium, et cetera. But after
(16:14):
Matt learned about Stanley Harlan, he began to read other
news articles, lots of them. Now with his mind open
to the idea that the taser could cause harm, he
read more stories of people who were shot by tasers
in the chest.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
There was a kid named Darryl Turner that had I
don't know what year Daryl died two thousand and eight.
So there's a video of Darryl Turner and he got
tased and died.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And suddenly Matt was seeing things from a completely different perspective.
He started collecting the news articles and then actually looking
up the lawsuits the articles were pointing to against Taser International,
depositions in court filings alleging the company knew tasers caused
cardiac arrest, so he began to print those out too.
(17:01):
He put his pages in a brown accordion folder, and
each day it.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Got thicker, and I would say between like September fourteen,
like in the December is when I really went down
this rabbit hole and was coming across all this stuff,
and I'm just like, why don't cops know any of
this stuff? Like, if you knew this, you wouldn't use
this thing. How the fuck is this even going on.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
That's when Matt started to read studies he'd never heard
about before, ones that completely contradicted the studies he was
familiar with from taser training. These studies clearly showed the
taser's electric current could override someone's regular heartbeat like a
pacemaker gone haywire, and speed it up to rapid rates.
To rapid sometimes, like in his son's case, it could
(17:53):
lead to a cardiac arrest. Doctors called it cardiac capture
and hit Matt. This was the world where doctor Augustin lived.
In this world, the taser could cause a cardiac arrest
wasn't some myth, It was science. Why wasn't it seen
as reality? In Matt's world? Cops were the ones using
(18:16):
this weapon, and yet the only reason he was learning
about the danger was because his own son got hurt.
Even some of the company's studies were quietly admitting that
Taser could affect the heart. Matt found one in a
medical journal from twenty ten, published four years before Bryce
was tasered. The study was run by doctor Jeff Hoe,
(18:39):
Taser International's medical director at the time. He was testing
a new Taser model. It was a slightly less powerful
weapon than the X twenty six, and Hoe was pretty
sure it was ready for sales. But one of the
people observing the test with Taser's doctors was a paramedic
turned cop, a guy who was getting more and more
concerned about what he was being behind closed doors during
(19:01):
pig tests. Oakland PDS Mike Leonesio he was still accepting
invitations to Taser's tests, and some of the tests were
not on pigs, they were on human beings. Mike remembers
they started this test during the company's annual.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Conference, and I mean it was a big fanfare, you know, lights,
and they had the countdown clock.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
The conference was at a resort in Arizona and they
were launching the new Taser X three. Mike says they
had set up a lab and a trailer in the
parking lot.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
They were asking for human volunteers, and you know, you've
got a room of six hundred, eight hundred cops and
they would give you a little perk, so like if
you signed up, they would give you a T shirt,
a lab rat T shirt.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
It actually had a rat on a lab ren Mike says.
Doctor Hoe hooked each volunteer up to an ultrasound machine
to get an accurate measure of their heart rhythm. During
the taser shot. Mike was hanging out by the medical equipment.
He walked does The first few guys got zapped without issue.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
So then we get to a sheriff's deputy sergeant from Texas.
So he comes and he's not a real big guy,
and he comes in and they run him through all
the paces and they do the pre medical thing and
get him behind the screen and they shoot him with
the thing, and then they take him over and they
lay him down, hook him all up and they hit
him and they get cardiac captured.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
The electric current from this new taser model captured the
deputy's normal heartbeat and sped it up again like a
revd up pacemaker.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I remember Hoe was standing there and I remember looking
at the screen, and I said, that's capture.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Mike had seen the taser effect the heart and pig testing,
but this was a human during a controlled experiment designed
to be as safe as possible.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The deputy was fine. I mean, he didn't have any
negative effects, he wasn't unconscious, he didn't do anything. I mean,
it was really a couple of seconds maybe, but it
was clearly capture.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
That was the thing. Cardiac capture wasn't a death sentence.
Previous tests and pigs had shown that most of the
time when the taser caused capture, the pig's hearts went
back to normal when the shock was over. But this
was the first human test on this new model, and
not even ten volunteers in someone's heart got captured. Mike
(21:29):
told me that doctor Host shut down the test. A
few Taser employees hopped in a car and took the
new prototype back to headquarters.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Maybe a couple of hours went by, and the technical
guys come back and I said, wait a minute, hold
on a minute. We just saw what happened here. You're
going to start up again. And they said, oh, yeah,
I don't know. We fixed the problem. And I said,
what do you mean, you fix the problem, and these
are the exact words.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
I said, well, we tweaked it.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I said, you tweaked what he says, we took the
weapon and we tweaked it. It's fine now. And I said, well,
what is a tweak What does that mean? And that's
all they would say is we tweaked it. It's fine,
It's okay now.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Months later, doctor Hoe was questioned about the incident under
oath and he said he didn't know what they did
to tweak it either. At the time, Mike remembers he
couldn't believe they were going forward with the test.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
I said, you know, you guys are downplaying this thing,
and you know, everything's fine. And granted, I'm glad there's
nothing wrong with the deputy. I'm glad that it was
just you know, we saw it was a couple of seconds.
No big Well, I'm not going to say no big deal,
because any time you're affecting the heart like that, it
is it is a big deal. But the fact that
they just wouldn't tell me what they did, what was wrong,
(22:49):
how they fixed it, that was a little disturbing. So
I went home still concerned.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Mike says he kept bringing up the incident with doctor
Hoe and the other scientists running the test, and at.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
First their response was no, no, this was an aberration.
This is like you know, statistically, it's not significant, it's
not relevant. I said, look, if you don't report this
in your study, then I'm going to report it. So
they said, fine, all right, we'll make sure that it's
in there, and I said, okay.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Five years later, Matt Masters was printing documents off the
Internet and putting them in his folder. That's when he
saw training bulletin fifteen, issued by Taser International on September thirtieth,
two thousand and nine, about three months after the human test.
Mike saw Matt read the eighteen page document and his
jaw dropped Underneath a bullet point labeled cardiac. He read
(23:51):
the risk of an adverse cardiac event related to a
Taser ECD discharge is deemed to be extremely low. This
meant that five years before Timothy Runnels tasered Bryce, Taser
International told cops the taser could affect the heart, but
at least in Matt's case, he'd never heard it before.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Nobody ever told us any of this when I first
got trained, and I want to say around two thousand
and four ish. You know, fast forward to twenty fourteen,
ten years later, there was no change in what I
was trained to know. Ford to twenty.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Fourteen, all cops got basically the same training on tasers.
If Matt didn't know a taser could cause cardiac arrest,
why would the guy who shot his son in the
chest with a taser? No, So Matt was wondering if
(24:50):
this was just a tragic mistake. What if Bryce resisted
arrest and Runalds thought he was doing the right thing.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And then I started kind of doubt my and really thinking, well,
maybe maybe he really didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So six months after Timothy Runnells tase Bryce, Matt and
Stacy were surprised to learn that Runnels was going to
be criminally charged. It's rare officers are given lots of
leeway through the objectively reasonable standard established by the Supreme Court. Basically,
if another cop in the same circumstances would make the
same choice, it's considered reasonable. There's no official stat but
(25:31):
nonprofits estimate less than one percent of officers are prosecuted
for excessive force. In Runnel's case, there were four charges.
Matt read through each of them, but he didn't find
any details about what actually happened that day or what
Bryce did to deserve being tasered. Paul It said was
(25:51):
that Runnels continuously tasered Bryce and that he deliberately dropped
Bryce on his face. Runnels decided to take a plea deal.
He pled guilty, but only to one charge. He would
only admit that he deliberately dropped Bryce on his face.
Prosecutors dropped the other three charges. When Matt, Stacey and
(26:20):
Bryce made their way to the federal courthouse in downtown
Kansas City in September of twenty fifteen, they sat on
the right side of the courtroom. A judge called Timothy
Runnels to the stand and he pled guilty to the
one remaining charge, deliberately dropping Bryce's face first on the ground.
The hearing lasted less than thirty minutes. Runnels was going
(26:43):
to go to prison for four years. He'd already lost
his job, but if he hadn't dropped Bryce on his
face after tasering him, he might still be a cop.
The hearing was paid ful for Matt, Stacey and Bryce,
but there were no surprises. It was what happened after
(27:06):
that they remember most. As they were getting up to leave.
The assistant US attorney invited them into a conference room
and asked if they wanted to see the dashcam footage.
It had been almost one year to the day since
Bryce was tasered, a year of wondering what really happened.
Finally they wouldn't have to wonder anymore. The video opens.
(28:08):
The camera shows what Runnel sees when he starts to
follow Bryce in his car. It is a gorgeous late
summer day. Suburban lawns and green oak trees pass by
in the frame. Bryce's gray Pontiac Grand Prix stays in
focus for about twenty seconds before Runnels flicks on his siren.
Bryce pulls over in front of his friend Curtis's.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
House outside of man and a silver Pontiac.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
It's like one I.
Speaker 7 (28:34):
He's realizing his King Henry one.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Runnels gets out of his cruiser and crosses the screen,
walking toward Bryce's passenger side door. Roll all the way down,
that's Runnell's voice.
Speaker 6 (28:46):
Okay, hey, you got roll the way down, but.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The passenger window is broken. Bryce asks, you can't hear me.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Hear me roll it all the way down. I can
heave it. Roll it all the way down for what.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Donalds crosses the frame again, marching towards Bryce's driver's side door.
Bryce tries to explain that his window doesn't roll down,
just one opens.
Speaker 7 (29:10):
Yeah, what he's doing?
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Get out, pullet out down.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Runnels opens Bryce's door, But what out?
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Hey, minor arrest?
Speaker 7 (29:19):
Get out, mine arrest out.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
I'm gonna pull you, don't.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
He opens the door and says I'm gonna pull you
out if you don't get out. Bryce is doing what
his parents told him to do. If a cop asks
you to get out of a car, you should ask why.
But Runnalds won't answer. He reaches into the car and
starts to pull Bryce out by the collar of his shirt,
but Bryce grabs the steering wheel and Runnelds loses his grip.
(29:47):
Get out.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
Do you really want to get page right in your middle?
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Get your ass out and out. Runnelds tries to pull
Bryce out one more time.
Speaker 7 (29:56):
I haven't done anything off.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I haven't done anything off, sir.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
What am I under arrest?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah? Am I under arrest?
Speaker 7 (30:03):
Mind the red line the wret you.
Speaker 6 (30:06):
Man, You're under arrest for what?
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:08):
For what? Ronald steps back about two feet and pulls
out his taser. He points it at Bryce.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
All right, find Fucky, just get out out out right now,
out of the car.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
You can hear the familiar rhythmic sound of the taser.
In the room where Matt and Stacy are watching the
dash can video for the first time, they're horrified. Bryce
steps out of the driver door, his arms tense and
stiff at his side as the taser's electric current pulses
through his body at nineteen times a second.
Speaker 6 (30:43):
Okay's the appointment on the ground, under the car, on
the ground, on the ground. Ah, don'd you hands on
your back?
Speaker 2 (30:56):
What about?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Bryce is not moving on the screen as run handcuffs
h the click click, click, still ticking. Matt has no
idea that Bryce had been tased for so long. In
the conference room where he and his family are watching,
Matt stands up and screams of the TV. Let off
the goddamn trigger. Finally, after about twenty seconds, it stops.
(31:22):
A taser cycle only lasts for five seconds. This was
the moment when Matt first understood that Bryce had been
tased more than once, that Runnels had held down on
the trigger, tasering Bryce for at least twenty seconds straight.
(31:43):
In the video, Runnel's yanks Bryce up by his arms.
He drags him behind Bryce's car toward the curb, and
he throws Bryce handcuffed and in cardiac arrest, on his face.
(32:08):
His chin hits the curb. This is the moment Bryce's
teeth shattered. Runnels starts going through Bryce's pockets. You don't
like to play by the rules.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Runnels puts his foot on Bryce's back and stands over him.
Right lerk it up.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
I don't play games.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
But Bryce is still laying on his chest, handcuffed, his
face pressed against the curb. A minute thirty seconds have
now passed since Ronald's first taste. Bryce Runnelds calls an ambulance.
It's protocol for independence, PD.
Speaker 7 (32:46):
You ready to sit up now?
Speaker 6 (32:49):
I've been tased a dozen times. Doesn't act like that.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Bryce isn't moving. Six minutes after Runnald's first taste, ice
paramedics arrive.
Speaker 7 (33:02):
He's trying to Blue Wise to look.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
You know, he's hurt of blue.
Speaker 6 (33:05):
You bring that on?
Speaker 5 (33:07):
Oh wow, man, a bull stickle Marguts starts call me that.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
About seven minutes after Runnel's first tase Bryce, paramedics shock
Bryce's heart with an automated defibrillator. About fifteen minutes after
Runnel's taste, Bryce, Matt, and Stacy arrive watching in the
conference room. They can't see themselves on the video, but
(33:35):
they can hear each other shouting off screen for a
fucking dance, jack of you the fuck that. It's hard
to see on the dash video, but if you look closely,
there's a small bag of marijuana on the roof of
(33:56):
Bryce's car.
Speaker 7 (33:58):
Right, You're right right.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Paramedics wheeled Bryce on a stretcher across the screen. Stacy
follows behind. She can't. Stacy stands next to Bryce's car,
her hands pressed to her cheeks, and watches as paramedics
lift Bryce into an ambulance. The video ends.
Speaker 7 (34:27):
And I had really prepared myself to see something, some
sort of threatening behavior, whether he was going to flick
a cigarette out of the you know, or something that
could be perceived as threatening, or words, or maybe some
disrespectful dialogue between the two of them or something. Bryce
(34:50):
didn't do anything, and I just couldn't believe it. I
just couldn't believe what I saw. What did he do?
That's what I didn't see was what was so shocking
to me, aside from how this man that did this
(35:10):
to Bryce just treated him like an animal, I mean
worse than an animal. He didn't deserve this. Somewhere along
the lines, I had placed a little bit of preparedness
that he did something and he didn't.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I'm mad at myself because I doubted Bryce. You know,
I did doubt Bryce. I doubted Bryce woman. I doubted
Timothy Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Matt told me about how a couple months later he
attended an annual in service training on tasers, kind of
like an annual refresher course for the Kansas City PD.
There would go over any changes in case law or
new information from the previous year. Matt thought Bryce's case
would come up during the session. You can imagine what
an emotional hurdle this was for Matt, but he gathered
(36:03):
all his courage. He wanted to make one concise point.
If cops were going to shoot people in the chest,
they needed to know that taser might kill someone. He
described how he sat in the back of the room
and watched patiently as the instructor went over the same
talking points he'd always heard. Be careful shooting people who
(36:25):
could fall off a ledge or might be close to
something flammable like gasoline. One point was different from when
he was first trained, don't use tasers on people who
are simply arguing with you. But the moment, Matt says
he was waiting for, when they would go over what
happened to Bryce and bring up the warning, the one
that warned officers there was a chance the taser could
(36:47):
cause cardiac arrest, the one in that eighteen page bulletin
Matt was keeping in his folder, the one Taser International
released five years before his own kid was nearly killed.
That warning never came up.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
That's what caught me off guards because I'm like, Okay,
my son just got tas and wining cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
It felt like a lie biomission, you know.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I'm just like dying inside, like whoa bro, Like seriously,
like you're gonna fucking sit here and say that there's
no cardiac risk.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
According to the Kansas City Police Department, Taser International's eighteen
page bulletin did make it into the department's training when
it was first announced, but they decided that it wasn't
relevant enough to repeat every year. Sitting in the back
of that training, Matt told me that he thought about Bryce.
He thought about how it could be any one of
(37:42):
them in that room tasing some kid in the chest,
causing a cardiac arrest. He told me. He raised his hand.
He pointed out that the risks of cardiac arrest were
very real. Hell, they were personal.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, and you're sitting there going, hey, my kid got
tays and went in cardiac arrest. Like, if you need
somebody to talk to, come talk to this.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Guy, right, Matt says. The instructor told him in front
of the entire class that he was simply teaching the
slides that Taser International provided. Matt warned the other cops
in the room they weren't getting the full story, but
they looked at him like he was crazy, and.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
It's just basically like a middle finger to me. And
I was just kind of like, Okay, well I see
where this is. You know, nobody's going to listen.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
That Taser training clarified a lot for Matt. That's where
he changed his mind about who was to blame for what. Yes,
Timothy Runnels was responsible for being cruel and brutal, and
he was going to prison for it. But what happened
to Bryce wasn't just on runnels. Taser International was responsible
for misleading hundreds of thousands of cops all over the world,
(38:56):
making them think they had a weapon that couldn't kill. Now,
Matt decided Taser International was responsible for Bryce's brain damage
and he wanted to make them pay next time. On
(39:22):
Absolute Season one Taser Incorporated.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
My focus really, I was like, let's go after Taser.
Let's go after Taser, Mashal, That's the big one.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
I want to start by addressing a couple of questions
we've been receiving over email. The first one is our
chest hits with the Taser dangerous and the answer to
that is definitively no.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
This is really going to be hard to prove that
the Taser did this. The company that makes these things
is going to fight you.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Absolute Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good
in association with Signal Company Number One. Be sure to
follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and threads at Lava
for Good. Follow me at Nick Beredini on Instagram and Twitter.
Taser Incorporated is written and produced by me Nick Beredini.
Our executive producers are Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis.
(40:36):
Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Paul is our producer.
Hannah Biel is our writer and producer. Joe Plored is
our sound designer. Music composed and produced by Alexis Quadrado
at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Mariann mckune is our editor.
Fact checking by Dania Suleiman. Jeff Cliburn is our head
of marketing and Operations. Our social media director is East
(40:59):
Marine Guardama, our social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and
our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional reporting by Matt Stroud.
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