An elderly Australian woman with dementia was left in critical condition after being tased by police at a nursing home early Wednesday morning.
Clare Nowland, a 95-year-old grandmother, sustained life-threatening injuries when the electric weapon caused her to collapse and hit her head at the Yallambee Lodge facility in Cooma, New South Wales, according to reports. Local police confirmed Friday that the incident is being investigated by the homicide squad and that the senior officer involved is under review and taken off their regular duties.
Authorities initially said merely that a woman had “sustained injuries during an altercation” with officers at a nursing home, without disclosing that a Taser had been deployed. On Friday, police said the weapon had been used in response to Nowland having armed herself with a steak knife.
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New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Peter Cotter said Friday that Nowland left her room in the early hours and went to the kitchen at the home where she found the knife. Officers were then called by staff at the home, with multiple people trying to de-escalate the situation. Police claim Nowland started approaching them using a walking frame.
Cotter said that “it is fair to say” that Nowland was approaching “at a slow pace,” before she was tased, the Guardian reports. “She had a walking frame,” he said. “But she had a knife. I can’t take it any further what was going through anyone’s mind with the use of a Taser. That is for them.”
Andrew Thaler, a friend of Nowland’s family, told the BBC that Nowland was hit twice—in her chest and back—before she fell, and that she had suffered a dangerous brain bleed and skull fracture as a result. He said that her family have already started grieving because they don’t expect she’ll survive.
“The family are shocked, they’re confused... and the community is outraged,” Thaler said. “How can this happen? How do you explain this level of force? It’s absurd.”
Community groups including People with Disability Australia (PwD) have also questioned the police’s use of force. “She’s either one hell of an agile, fit, fast and intimidating 95-year-old woman, or there’s a very poor lack of judgment [from] those police officers,” PwD President Nicole Lee told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). “She needed somebody to... handle her with compassion and time, not Tasers.”
Australia’s Law Enforcement Conduct Commission said it is “independently monitoring” an internal police investigation into the incident. “No officer, not one of us, is above the law and all our actions will be scrutinized robustly and from a criminal perspective as well as a departmental perspective,” Cotter said.
