A Winn Parish grand jury will consider criminal charges against Officer Scott Nugent for the tasering Black youth Baron “Scooter” Pikes to death after he had been handcuffed. Pikes, 21, was in police custody for less than an hour before he died.
The killing took place on the afternoon of January 17 in Winnfield, La. Pikes had been spotted by police and confronted about an outstanding warrant for drug possession.
Baron Pikes was tasered to death
while handcuffed by a Louisiana
cop.
Nugent’s police report indicated that Pikes did not resist arrest and that he was lying face down on the ground when he was handcuffed. Police later claimed that Pikes had resisted arrest and that he had told officers that he was high on PCP and crack cocaine. An autopsy showed there were no drugs in his system.
According to Nugent’s own report, police delivered the first taser shot to the middle of Pikes’ back when he “refused” to stand up. Nugent noted that he shocked Pikes with the taser in quick succession, because he kept falling down and “refused” to stand up.
Witnesses to the violence told Pikes’ family that he put up no resistance and pleaded with Nugent: “Please, you all got me. Please don’t tase me again.” Handcuffed and begging for mercy, Pikes continued to be repeatedly tasered.
According to Winn Parish coroner Dr. Randolph Williams, police officers delivered nine taser shocks to the handcuffed man over a 14-minute interval. Williams further noted that Pikes showed no response to the last two taser shocks, which were fired as police pulled him from a patrol car into the police station. Pikes was already unconscious and died soon after.
Williams consulted about the case with Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist. After that consultation, Williams ruled that Pikes’ death was a homicide. The cause of death was listed as “cardiac arrest following nine 50,000-volt electroshock applications from a conductive electrical weapon.”
Baden noted that what the police did to Pikes that afternoon “could be considered to be torture.”
A strange coincidence further underscores the overt racism of the “justice” system in Louisiana: Pikes was a first cousin of Mychal Bell, one of the Black youth known as the Jena 6. Winnfield is just 40 miles from Jena.
The Jena 6 were charged with conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder following a scuffle with a white student who had been taunting Black youth. One of the white student’s friends had helped hang nooses from the “white tree” on campus after Black students asked permission to sit there. The Jena 6 case brought waves of condemnation and outrage, and lead to one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in decades in the small Louisiana town.
Kayshon Collins, Pikes’ stepmother, has become active in local protests in the wake of the killing. “A lot happens in this town and it just gets swept under the rug,” she is quoted in the Chicago Tribune. “What the police did to Scooter just isn’t right. They would never have tasered a white kid like that.”
Collins battle for justice may not be an easy one: Winnfield is a city with a solid record of corruption. Three years ago, the district attorney committed suicide after allegedly extorting money from defendants and skimming $200,000 from his office budget. Police chief Johnny Ray Carpenter, who hired Nugent, is a convicted drug dealer who was pardoned by former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Edwards is serving a jail term after being convicted on corruption charges.
The death of Baron “Scooter” Pikes was the result of a transparent act of racist police murder. All who were involved in this racist killing and subsequent cover-up must swiftly and forcibly be brought to justice.
