Err, wait
Snelgrove, an Emerson College student from East Bridgewater, was killed when she was struck in the eye by a pepper spray pellet fired by a police officer outside Fenway Park in October 2004, after Boston beat the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series.
If you said the police, you’d be wrong:
The city of Boston received $438,500 in a settlement between a pellet gun maker and the family of a college student killed after a Boston policeman fired pepper spray pellets into an unruly crowd celebrating a Red Sox win.
The city was entitled to a portion of the settlement as part of its agreement last year to pay the family of Victoria Snelgrove $5 million, the largest wrongful death settlement in Boston history.
The agreement included a stipulation that the city receive half of any proceeds, up to $2 million, from the family’s $10 million suit against the gun manufacturer, FN Herstal. The city also agreed to cooperate with the family in the suit.
So, the city paid. And the gun maker paid.
July 24th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Do I understand this properly? Boston won, and they rioted so much the cops had to use pepper spray to control it? Out in the red states, I think the jury would have figured the primary responsibility for bad things happening in a riot lay with the rioters – and I assume Snelgrave was one of them.
Beyond that, if the manufacturer can be held lieble for a “nonlethal” weapon that killed one person out of tens of thousands of uses, I not only see an end to Tasers, but cops are going to have to get a chunk of wood and carve their own batons after the manufacturers are sued into bankruptcy, and maybe Nerf should pull it’s entire product liine and hide their money before someone gets suffocated with a piece of foam…
July 24th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
1 She was not hit with pepper spray, she was hit with a “pepper paintball gun”, and no, it was not calabrated to tournment speeds. It’s actually designed to shoot a ball much faster.
2. She was not rioting. I rememeber this from the WaPo article (which I can’t get to)
3. The police stepped up and took responsbility for the shooting. That itself is pretty unusal.
Tino blogged about it. However the WaPo link is dead.
July 24th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Snelgrove
July 24th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
from the Wikipedia article about the “less than lethal” FN303:
“…The FN 303 was involved in a controversial 2004 incident in Boston in which Victoria Snelgrove was accidentally shot in the eye and fatally wounded. Subsequent tests by Israeli Police indicated that the 303’s accuracy “decreased significantly” after about three hundred firings. This is circumstantially corroborated by testimony of the officer who fired the weapon, stating that he was aiming at a rioter throwing bottles and did not even know a bystander had been hit.”
Here’s another batshit crazy idea from the same page:
“…or it can be mounted in an under-barrel configuration on most assault rifles when its stock assembly is removed (in this configuration, it is designated M303).”
Isn’t that like a Really Bad Idea? what happens when the cop pulls the wrong trigger? Remember that cop that shot instead of tasered that tree-bum?
July 24th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
not the actual riot, but a video:
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/4640578/detail.html
if you wanna skip all the window dressing, the actual video stream it this:
mms://a56.v12880f.c12880.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/56/12880/v0001/vod.ibsys.com/2005/0622/4640578.200k.wmv