A 95-year-old grandmother who was shot with a taser by Australian police in a retirement home is in critical condition as the homicide squad joins a high-profile investigation into the incident, police said on Friday.
Police were called to the Yallambee nursing home in Cooma, some 300km southwest of Sydney, on Wednesday after staff found resident Clare Nowland outside her room with a steak knife, the deputy commissioner said. of New South Wales Police, Peter Cotter.
Two officers spoke to Nowland for several minutes, but when she did not drop the knife and approached them, one fired a Taser, knocking her to the ground.
"By the time he received the taser, he was approaching the police, but it's fair to say at a slow pace," Cotter said during a news conference. "She had a walker, but she had a knife."
Nowland, who suffers from dementia, wandered the facility for several hours and grabbed the kitchen knife. She is in critical condition at the hospital, losing and passing out, leading to a public uproar over the incident.
"The use of a taser when a kind word was all she needed...she was confused, which is what happens with people who have dementia, she needed kind words and assistance and help. She didn't need the force of the law," community advocate Andrew Thaler told Reuters.
The officer who fired the taser was off duty pending a "level 1 critical incident investigation," a category police reserve for exceptional cases where injuries lead to death or imminent death. The homicide squad is involved.
"If you get to a threshold where it goes from being a departmental issue to being a criminal issue, we're certainly mature and transparent enough as an organization to do what needs to be done," Cotter said.
Body cameras recorded the encounter, but it was not in the public interest to release the footage because of the investigation, he said.
