RED BARN KICKS OFF ITS LANDMARK 45TH SEASON WITH THE HILARIOUS “THE FOREIGNER”
Police Taser Incident Settled For $850,000
Police Taser Incident Settled For $850,000
By Pru Sowers
A little more than a year after the Key Wes
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Pru, Naja Girard told me the settlement was for $1,000,000, $150,000 was for Murphy’s son, the rest for Murphy. Martha Huggins told me yesterday that she talked with City Finance Director Mark Finigan about Key West’s liability insurance coverage, did the rates go up after the Charles Eimers case? How about after the Murphy Case? She said Finegan said maybe the city is going to start self-insuring itself. She told me, she wondered if the city now is already doing that? I said I could not imagine the city’s insurance carrier sticking around after it paid out for the Charles Eimers case, knowing the city was not going to clean up its police department. Then came the Murphy settlement, even higher, right at the policy limits. I told Martha, if an insurance carrier does not take an offer to settle for the policy limits, then if a money damage award is higher, the insurance company has to pay for it, even if it’s, say, $10,000,000. There seems little doubt, from the hard evidence, that Officer Siracuse tasered Murphy from behind, without any warning. The plaintiff lawyer had that evidence; the jury would see that evidence, and that Siracuse said he was in front of Murphy and warned him to stand down, and Murphy tried to hit Moffet again and Siracuse tasered Murphy, whose head struck the sidewalk when he fell. My own “investigative corps”, some human, some angelic, told me, Murphy, who was white, and his wife, who were black, were accompanied by 2 black male friends, and when the awful racist slurs were spoken to Murphy and his black girlfriend by a white woman with her pet pit bull, with her white boyfriend beside her. and Murphy went after the white boyfriend, who tried to talk Murphy into letting it go, his girlfriend was drunk, then Murphy punched him – Jason Moffet. That incited Siracuse to taser Murphy from behind. In all ways, my “investigative team” found, this was a racially prejudiced incident. The irony, before going to Duval Street to party late that night, Murphy told his girlfriend he thought he would have trouble on Duval Street, if he went there. He went anyway, and when the premonition showed up in human form, he chose to fight, instead o walk away, and the catastrophe happened. Duval Street is a very dangerous place late at night, due to high incidence of booze and other narcotics consumption. That, too, and the racial prejudice, I imagine the plaintiff lawyer was going to prove to the jury. I can’t imagine the city commission wanted a blow by blow report of that trial appearing in the local newspapers, which Naja’s Key West the Newspaper newspaper would have taken center state, having discovered and broken the Murphy case, after the KWPD had tried to hide it, including making Murphy out to be a fugitive from the law.