The debate is raging on the Internet comment boards — our new water cooler, cracker barrel and barbershop rolled into one.
Did the police use excessive force in the Brian Cardall Taser death?
Was their behavior acceptable? Was the Taser necessary? Did they act appropriately?
Of course they didn't. A man is dead.
His wife called for help and wound up with a dead husband.
Cancel the investigation. Call off the task force. Quit paying the lawyers. This one's easy.
They shouldn't have used the Taser.
This isn't to say the police officers aren't good cops, that they didn't do their best, try their hardest and use what they thought was correct judgment.
But that judgment was wrong.
The incident was simple enough. The 32-year-old Cardall, who had been diagnosed as bipolar, was experiencing a mental meltdown and left his wife and young daughter in the car and started off down the rural southern Utah highway, agitated enough that he took off his clothes. Anna Cardall, Brian's wife, called 911 for emergency assistance. Police from the nearby city of Hurricane arrived, confronted the unclothed (and obviously unarmed) man and subdued him by shooting him with a Taser.
Brian Cardall never regained consciousness.
Not only was the death a problem, but then it turned out that Brian's father, Duane Cardall, is the longtime editorial director for KSL-TV News — the biggest media voice in the Intermountain West.
The Hurricane police lawyered up faster than a New Jersey drug dealer. They're not saying anything about the "alleged" incident until an extensive investigation takes place.
I fail to see what's to investigate, or what's to "allege." The officers were called to help stabilize an unstable situation. This wasn't a criminal they were confronting, a fugitive eluding the law. This was a wife saying my crazy husband is running down the road naked. Can you help?
What the officers did Did Not Work. Proof of that is in the morgue.
I feel sympathy for the police officers. I can't say that if I had been in their shoes I wouldn't have done the same thing. But if I had, I hope I could see in retrospect that it was an awful idea.
Brian Cardall needed to be saved from himself, not saved from the police.
According to his father, Brian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, about five years ago when he was working on his master's degree at Utah State University. Bipolar is not an uncommon mental illness. Medical experts estimate that between 1 percent and 5 percent of Americans will experience bipolar symptoms of varying severity sometime in their lives.
In five years, said Duane Cardall, his son had experienced about three manic episodes and "once he got on his medication all were generally short-lived."
The irony is that when Anna called the police last Tuesday, it was because she needed help getting Brian his medication.
Now the family, and society at large, is left to lament the loss of a high-achiever who was close to finishing his doctorate work in molecular ecology at Northern Arizona University.
"He had an extraordinarily adventurous life," said Duane Cardall.
After graduating from Salt Lake's Olympus High School, Brian, an Eagle Scout and outdoors lover, signed on as a fly-fishing guide at a resort in southern Utah. After that he spent two years on an LDS mission in Spain. Then he went to work for an air service in Alaska. On his days off he would arrange to get dropped off on the flanks of Mount McKinley where he'd climb and camp until he had to go back to work.
"I asked him once what's the one thing you've done that you don't want your mother to know about," said his father. "And he said it was a winter ice climb of the Grand Teton. He said it was the only time he's been scared."
Brian learned to play guitar in college at Utah State and wrote songs in the Dylan genre, recording CDs under the pseudonym "Jonah." As an artist, he painted oil landscapes using scalpels instead of brushes.
"The list goes on and on. He just had lots of interests," said Duane. "He was a voracious reader of the news and was always writing letters to the editor and commenting on the comments boards."
He might have commented on this latest story about a Taser death in southern Utah. But he didn't get the chance, so I'll comment for him. The Tasering was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.