Body camera footage shows Killeen man being tased six times by police
By: Action starts at 6:38
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On Monday, KWTX News 10 got a first look at body camera footage from an incident involving Killeen police officers that happened two years ago.
Back on Jan. 16 2021 Truman McCollum Jr. rear ended another car in the drive-through of a Burger King on East Stan Schlueter Loop. Family members say at the time, he was having a seizure.
The 25-minute body cam footage begins with a Killeen police officer approaching a man in a blue truck that was rear-ended by a Gray Dodge Challenger.
“Hey what’s up man?” the officer tells the man in the truck.
The officer with the camera walks over to the Challenger that McCollum is in. During the interaction, most of the body camera is facing down to the pavement, but McCollum does not appear to respond to the officer’s questions.
“Sir are you going to talk to me?” the officer asks McCollum.
Firefighters eventually take McCollum to a Killeen fire ambulance at the scene. The officer starts heading back to the blue truck when he’s called back to the ambulance for some kind of incident.
“Watch that taser!” an officer tells others inside the ambulance.
Inside, we see McCollum being held down on the stretcher by officers. McCollum, who is Black, is tased a total of six times.
“Double cuff him, double cuff him,” an officer says inside the ambulance.
McCollum is eventually handcuffed and put into a Killeen police vehicle.
“I seen you moving around, and I was like ‘oh’ Did I tase you?” the officer with the body camera says to another officer.
Then the police officers weigh potential charges. In addition to resisting arrest, they discuss harm to a police officer and driving at an unsafe speed.
“Can we go with resisting?” one police officer, not the one with the camera, asks another.
“The only issue I see is with charging him with resistance is how are you going to articulate he was coherent enough to understand you were the police?” the police officer responds.
The video ends with McCollum still in the police car.
McCollum was ultimately charged with driving while intoxicated and resisting arrest. The Bell County Odyssey Portal criminal records search lists McCollum’s two charges as misdemeanors.
The Killeen Police Department confirmed that two of the three police officers named in the lawsuit are still working for the force. The department did not answer whether they launched an internal investigation following the incident.
On Monday, two attorneys filed a civil lawsuit against the three police officers involved in this incident, as well as the City of Killeen.
“If you don’t stop it, it might not be my son next time, it might be your son, your mommy, your daddy or your daughter,” McCollum’s mother, Rawsy Dyana McCollum, said.
The family attorneys said at the press conference that the city failed to train police officers on the signs and symptoms of a seizure.
A spokesperson for the city of Killeen confirmed that they have received this lawsuit. Both the city and the Killeen Police Department told KWTX News 10 that they can’t comment on pending litigation.