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showered at the Bradley County Jail after being arrested for underage drinking. Adams, 20, in a telephone interview said. he had been sprayed with mace while being arrested and the shower was required to wash the mace from his eyes and mouth. He said his mouth was foaming from the mace and officers accused him of spitting at them. He said he was tased in the middle spine and in the kidney area by officer Marshall Hicks while laying face down on the shower floor.
Wolfe said that while McCargo remains in a coma and the prognosis is not encouraging, the Sheriff's Office has not provided answers to questions by his family as to why a few hours after being walked into the Bradley County Justice Center he was carried out in a coma. He said the Sheriff's Office is saying that McCargo was tased just once in the neck and the internal history of the Taser allegedly used, recorded one 5 second burst at the time McCargo was shocked. But Wolfe said he has been unable to uncover real evidence of what happened because the surveillance tape was recorded over and an additional video tape taken using a hand held camera set up by Marshall Hicks, the officer alleged to have used a Taser on Adams, has not been produced. Wolfe said that all evidence of the time McCargo was in custody is, with the exception of the Taser, missing.
Wolfe said in a media release, "The family of Chris McCargo is asking the Bradley County Sheriff's office to withdraw from the investigation of Chris' case and allow the FBI to do the entire investigation. At present Tonya Elkins of the BCSO is doing most of the investigating, despite the fact that she is a social friend with officers Tina and Mike Cooper, the latter of them fired a stun gun into Chris McCargo's neck." "After losing Chris' bodily fluids, his blood stained clothes, the film of tasering, and each of the six straps that held Chris in his restraint chair, Sheriff Dan Gilley's staff simply can't be trusted to do a fair or honest investigation, much less so when he is asking friends to investigate friends." "Moreover, the family was never informed of Chris' tasing by Gilley's employees; instead, they learned what really happened from an inmate, who was courageous enough to convey the whole truth to Chris' family, including the fact that officer Marshall Hicks had mounted a hand-held camera to film Chris for over three hours. At the meeting that Dan Gilley called with the family, Gilley stated that he had only a few minutes of Chris' custody on film."
In November 2005, before the McCargo incident, three former Bradley County jail inmates filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming physical assault, illegal Taser gun use on inmates who are handcuffed and other allegations. The three plaintiffs, Charles Hicks, Robert Tribble and James Ledford allege inmates Adam Colvin, Richard Jerger, Ramsey Harris, Tark Martin, Jackie Gray and others as well as themselves, were physically assaulted and Taser guns used illegally on cuffed inmates.
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