Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective. 

“At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.”

Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen. 

This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

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Listen: Absolute: Taser Incorporated (Lava for Good)

Read: A Shot to the Heart (The Intercept)

Credit

Reporter: Nick Berardini | Producers: Hannah Beal and Jackie Pauley | Senior producer: Kara Kornhaber | Story editing: Marianne McCune | Fact checker: Dania Suleman | Engineering and sound design: Joe Plourde | Composer: Alexis Cuadrado | Additional reporting: Matt Stroud | Social media: Ismary Guardarrama and Sarah Gibbons | Marketing and operations: Jeff Clyburn | Art director: Andrew Nelson | Executive producers: Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wortis | Absolute: Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good in collaboration with Signal Company Number One.

Producer for Reveal: Steven Rascón | Editor for Reveal: Jenny Casas | Fact checker for Reveal: Nikki Frick | General counsel for Reveal: Victoria Baranetsky | Digital producer for Reveal: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design for Reveal: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Production manager for Reveal: Zulema Cobb | Deputy executive producer for Reveal: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer for Reveal: Brett Myers | Host for Reveal: Al Letson

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 The Taser. It’s a weapon that goes hand in hand with modern policing, but, of course, it didn’t always exist. The first attempt to create one happened in the 1970s, at a time when cops across the country were looking for an alternative to firing their guns.  
Greg Meyer:The bosses decided we got to find a better way, and that’s how I ended up with the Nonlethal Weapons Project. I had no idea that was going to become my life’s work.  
Al Letson:Greg Meyer worked for the Los Angeles Police Department. He’s retired now, but Greg was once in charge of finding a solution.  
Greg Meyer:I actually wrote an article, 40 years ago or so, the title of which was Taser’s, Tear Gas, Whips, Poles, and Chains, Your Nonlethal Weapons Alternatives.  
Al Letson:Greg said the LAPD sent out a survey to the 50 biggest police departments in the US.  
Greg Meyer:What do you guys use besides the baton, and the handgun, and the handcuffs to subdue people?  
Al Letson:But cops everywhere were kind of in the same boat. Greg was so stuck. He even ran ads in the newspaper.  
Greg Meyer:We actually had this guy in Australia say that we should use bullwhips on people, because that’s what they use, and it’s like, what?  
Al Letson:Then Greg found a news clip about a scientist working on a kind of electric gun. So Greg calls him, and goes over to see the first version of the Taser.  
Greg Meyer:I remember he asked, he said, “Greg, did you ever tune up on a car, and did you ever touch the distributor cap and get a short circuit through your body?” And I go, “Yeah, that happened.” He says, “But it didn’t kill you, right? No, but it really startles you, right?”  
Al Letson:Soon, the LAPD had a few hundred Tasers. It was a great concept, but it had a major problem. It didn’t always work.  
Newsreel:The Taser should have dropped him long enough for the officers to take control. It didn’t.  
Newsreel:From stun guns to Tasers, they can be effective, but have never been totally reliable against focused, combative attackers.  
Greg Meyer:It just wasn’t ready for prime time.  
Al Letson:It would be about 20 years after the first version of the Taser, before a new company would find success. This Taser was made by a young entrepreneur, with a biology degree from Harvard, and a dream to end police shootings. His name was Rick Smith, and he promised his Taser would work.  
Rick Smith:Our sales pitch was really easy. We’d go around to the police departments, and we’d say, “Hey, who’s your biggest, toughest guy?” Bring him in. “Okay, think you can beat this? Here’s a hundred bucks.” We’d hit them with the Taser, and boom, down they would go.  
Al Letson:This time, the Taser was doing what it promised to do. And thousands of police departments, including the LAPD, started buying them.  
Greg Meyer:And nobody’s getting beat up, nobody’s getting hurt, so it was revolutionary.  
Newsreel:Last year, in Phoenix, gun shootings by police went down by half, and fatal shootings dropped by a third. There’s a 12-week backlog in demand.  
Al Letson:Rick took his company public, Taser International, which today is called Axon. That was in May of 2001, and he raised about $8 million. Three years later, it was worth 1.9 billion.  
 Taser International sold its product as a non-lethal weapon for police, and built its business on the trust of law enforcement agencies across the country. But, as the Taser grew in popularity, so would the number of serious injuries and deaths.  
 This week, we’re revisiting a show we made in partnership with the Lava for Good podcast: Absolute Taser Incorporated, Its host and reporter Nick Berardini has spent the last 15 years investigating the company’s claim that the Taser was truly safe. He starts with the story of one police officer who would find out there was a lot he didn’t know the weapon was capable of.  
Nick Berardini:The Kansas City Police Department had tasers back in 2004. Matt Masters remembers getting trained with other cops to use one for the first time.  
Matt Masters:They made all of our guys get tased, and they all crumpled up on the floor, from the smallest guy to the biggest guy.  
Nick Berardini:Then it was Matt’s turn to get tased for the first time.  
Matt Masters:I mean, it’s probably not appropriate to say I cried like a little girl, but I cried like a little girl. I was screaming. It was the most excruciating pain. You don’t breathe. I mean, maybe you breathe, but it doesn’t feel like you breathe, it feels like you just lock up. That shock goes through you, and you’re just like … To me, it’s excruciating pain. But, I will say, that once it’s over and done with, there is no more pain. It’s weird.  
Nick Berardini:Tasers were designed to be used against people who were violently resisting arrest, people who might eventually be shot if things got out of hand and cops couldn’t get them under control.  
Matt Masters:At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, and you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that? You can just shoot them with a Taser. So it became more of a compliance tool, an everyday compliance tool, where, “Hey, put your hands behind your back.” “F***, you.” “Okay. Watch this.” And it was a taser deployment. And that was how we were trained.  
Nick Berardini:Matt became a cop in 1996, and worked his way up to the department’s most elite unit, SNU-TAC, the Street Narcotics Unit Tactical Team.  
Matt Masters:It was just kicking in doors, and rifles, and chasing bad guys, and that was a level up.  
Nick Berardini:Matt was the first man through the door on over 1,000 high-risk warrant arrests.  
Stacy Masters:It became part of his identity. It became part of who he was, instead of what he did.  
Rick Smith:That’s Stacy Masters, Matt’s wife, and the mother of their two sons, Colin and Bryce. She says, back then Matt was consumed with the job. Even family dinner revolved around Matt’s work as a cop.  
Stacy Masters:It came to a point where I would really resent that question at the dinner table, “Hey, Matt, what’s a good story?” Because I didn’t want him to be that in that moment, I wanted him to be a cousin, or a son, or a husband, or … I wanted us to shift and, okay, well … Because, immediately, his body language would change, and he would take on that persona, and you would just see him leave, with him being right next to you.  
Nick Berardini:Tactical cops have this phrase, living in the red. It means living without fear of consequences. Matt was living in the red. He spent years in SNU-TAC, kicking down doors. Until the consequences caught up with him.  
 During a car chase in 2007, Matt’s partner was shot and paralyzed in a gunfight. It was a devastating wake-up call. And soon after, Stacy gave him a choice, the tactical team or his family. He traded the drug squad for a desk job in HR.  
Matt Masters:I mean, it was boring, it wasn’t fun.  
Nick Berardini:But boring also meant that he had time to be a dad. He finally started going to his son’s football games, something he’d missed for years. When their oldest, Colin, got his license, Matt brought him car shopping. They found a used gray Pontiac Grand Prix, with leather trim, tinted windows, and a ground effects package straight from Fast and the Furious.  
Matt Masters:It was funny because, when we bought it, the guy told me, he is like, “Be careful, man.” He is like, “The cops do not like this car.” And I was like, “That’s okay, because I’m a cop, I ain’t got to worry about it, right?”  
Nick Berardini:Matt bought the car, and that’s when he put a thin blue line sticker on the back windshield. A few years later, the Masters’ younger son, Bryce, inherited it from his brother. Soon, Bryce was driving everywhere, and the car did start getting attention from cops. Not at Kansas City PD, where Matt worked, but a smaller neighboring department in the Missouri town where Bryce was about to be a senior in high school, Independence.  
 Bryce was stopped a couple times, and was caught with a small amount of marijuana. In one stop, Bryce told his parents that an officer tore the thin blue line sticker off the back windshield. Matt and Stacy didn’t like that Bryce was smoking weed, but privately they worried that the Independence cops were starting to get the wrong idea about their son.  
Matt Masters:They didn’t like the tinted windows, they didn’t like the ground effects package on the car, they didn’t like that this kid matched his shoes and his clothes up, and kind of dressed a little too flashy for them.  
Nick Berardini:Matt thought that he could straighten things out by talking to the guys he knew at Independence PD. But then, Bryce was stopped again, in September 2014. The football season was just getting started, and in Kansas City, the Chiefs are the center of the universe on Sundays. Matt and Stacy were watching the game when Matt’s phone rang, it was Bryce’s friend Curtis.  
Matt Masters:And he’s like, “Hey, Bryce is getting stopped out in my front yard.” And he is like, “I don’t know what’s going on, but the cop is trying to get him out of the car.” And I was like, “Okay.”  
 Really, initially, I didn’t panic or anything. I didn’t think, oh my God, my kid’s getting stopped. At the time, cops got free passes from me. Maybe Bryce did something wrong.  
 Curtis called me back and he goes, “You need to get here.” And I was like, oh my God, what is going on?  
Stacy Masters:The look on his face told me that, somewhere, somebody wasn’t okay.  
Matt Masters:I hung up the phone, and I told Stacy, I’m like, “This is something else, and something’s not good, something’s not right. Something happened, and we just need to get there.”  
Stacy Masters:It’s a 10 minute, 11, 12 minute drive probably. And in that period of time of us getting in the car, Curtis is calling us and saying, “Where are you at? They just Tasered him.”  
 “And he is not moving, and he’s not breathing.” And we’re like, what?  
Nick Berardini:Matt weaved his way through traffic, and they pulled up to the scene.  
Matt Masters:By this time, there was a fire truck there, an ambulance there. And, of course, we walk up to the scene, and of course the cops were like, “Get back.” And you’re like, “Do not touch me.” I’m like, “That’s my kid.”  
Nick Berardini:It was chaos. About a half dozen Independence officers marked off the street, and rifled through Bryce’s car. Neighbors were out in the yard.  
Matt Masters:When they put him on the gurney, they’d put a tube down his throat, and were intubating him with a bag. And then I was over the top of him, looking into his eyes, and he was completely limp. And I remember looking over at him, over the top of his head, looking over at his face, and looked into his eyes, and there was … I’ll never forget that. It was just a blank.  
Nick Berardini:Bryce’s mom Stacy was in a panic. How the hell did this happen? And that’s when she spotted Timothy Runnels, one of the Independence officers who had stopped Bryce in his car earlier that summer.  
Stacy Masters:And he’s kind of leaned up against his patrol car, not a care in the F***ing world. I needed him to be like, “Wow, I really took this too far.” I needed that from him. And instead, I see this arrogant (bleep), proud of himself. And I wanted … I wanted … I don’t know what I wanted to do.  
Nick Berardini:Stacy tried to ride in the ambulance with Bryce, but she wasn’t allowed to.  
Matt Masters:We decided, in that moment, to just split up. She took the truck and followed the ambulance to the hospital, and I kind of stayed behind. Because I was more in the mode of like, if you’re going to cover some (bleep) up, I’m going to sit here and watch you cover it up. Because I didn’t trust that they were going to not spin it in a way that was beneficial to the police department.  
Nick Berardini:At the hospital, they wheel Bryce into the ER.  
Stacy Masters:I get right back there, and it’s bad. It’s really, really, really bad.  
Nick Berardini:Bryce was hooked up to a ventilator. His skin was pale, and his lips were still blue. Bryce was convulsing, and his body had twisted itself into a kind of horrifying fetal position.  
Stacy Masters:Like his arms and his legs were just doing unnatural things.  
Nick Berardini:His fingers and toes curled inward, and his arms were bent toward his chest.  
Stacy Masters:I didn’t want to see him do that, I didn’t want to see him moving that way.  
Nick Berardini:A nurse explained that Bryce’s position was a sign of severe brain damage. He needed an MRI immediately, so they could know just how bad it was. They brought Stacy out to the waiting room. She called Matt.  
Matt Masters:And she said, “You need to get here.” That’s when I started learning how bad it was.  
Nick Berardini:The neurologist pulled them into a private room, and explained that Bryce had had a cardiac arrest. Given the signs of brain damage he was already showing, they estimated his heart had been stopped between seven and eight minutes. That’s how long his brain went without oxygen. Bryce was 17, his body was strong and healthy, so if anyone had a shot at a miraculous recovery, it would be Bryce.  
Stacy Masters:They had already said that he may never come out of this vegetative state. This is what he has to look forward to. So it was as awful as it sounds. I just remember feeling like, do I want him to live?  
Matt Masters:I will be honest, we thought he was on drugs. I mean, what else do you think?  
Nick Berardini:Matt and Stacy caught Bryce smoking weed, but they didn’t suspect he was on any hard drugs. Still, nothing else made sense. Late that night, the surgeon, Dr. Stanley Augustin, came in to check on Bryce.  
Matt Masters:That was the first thing that came out of our mouth, was like, “What happened? Is he high on drugs?” Augustin, he just matter-of-factly looked at me, and he’s like, “Oh, no, he is not on drugs, it was a Taser. A Taser caused this.” I had no idea that was even possible.  
Nick Berardini:The surgeon was so confident. In Dr. Augustin’s world, this was obvious. But in Matt’s world, the cop world, the opposite was true. Matt was just as sure the Taser couldn’t cause a cardiac arrest, as the surgeon was that it could. Now, these two worlds were colliding, and Matt had to figure out which one was real.  
Al Letson:Coming up, Nick gets a behind the scenes look at the studies on Taser safety.  
Nick Berardini:Why don’t we know about this? Why aren’t you reporting it? And I just never was able to get a satisfactory answer to those kinds of questions.  
Al Letson:That’s next, on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 Rick Smith had gotten rich selling tasers to police departments. His company Taser International, which would become Axon in 2017, marketed the weapon as a non-lethal device.  
Rick Smith:Look, I’ve been hit with this thing seven times. Every senior employee at this company has been hit with a taser. Many of our wives, many of our children have been hit with tasers, so we believe this is the safest way to get a violent person under control.  
Al Letson:But with the weapon’s success came a wave of controversy.  
Newsreel:For tasers, Rick Smith, sales and profits are skyrocketing, but so is another statistic, taser-related deaths.  
Al Letson:The official company line was that tasers were safe, and if someone happened to die while being tased, the cause of the death was something else like drugs or a tragic coincidence.  
Rick Smith:None of these cases has the person died while being hit with the taser.  
Reporter:You’re saying that this was a coincidence, they would’ve died anyway?  
Rick Smith:In every single case, these people would’ve died anyway.  
Al Letson:Reporter Nick Berardini has been chasing this question for years. If the taser is safe, then why were some people dying and getting badly hurt? Today, we’re revisiting a show we first aired last summer. It’s a partnership with Nick’s podcast series, Absolute: Taser Incorporated. He starts with someone who saw it all from the inside: a cop who trained other cops on Tasers.  
Nick Berardini:I’ve read every PowerPoint presentation Taser International used to train cops from 2000 to 2015. There wasn’t anything I saw that made the taser seem dangerous. One of the slides that jumps out to me is the one that says the taser is weaker than a Christmas tree bulb. Mike Leonesio was a real believer. He trusted the weapon was safe, and he was skeptical about the reports of taser-related deaths.  
Mike Leoneisio:You read the media reports and I mean they made this weapon look like it was, people were out there dying left and right. Every time an officer used it, it was basically lethal force.  
Nick Berardini:Mike was a former paramedic turned cop working for the Oakland Police Department, and from 2001 to 2008, he trained other cops how to use tasers.  
Mike Leoneisio:I was seeing officers would come in and voice concerns about how, “Hey, did you see that news article? Somebody got killed by a taser?” I said, “No, impossible can’t happen. We’ve got a compendium of research that’s three feet tall and no, it can’t happen.”  
Nick Berardini:Mike was good at training cops. His confidence was contagious, and even though he was confident in his training and the potential of the taser, he talked a lot about all these headlines that said people were dying. Taser International was constantly doing cutting edge research to back up its claims. One day as they were talking, Mike just asked could he actually go see some of this testing for himself?  
Mike Leoneisio:I want to make sure this weapon’s what they say it is, and I’ll be the first person outside of the company who’s ever been able to attend one of these things. I said, so what does it hurt?  
Nick Berardini:Taser execs said, “Sure.” Mike signed an NDA and flew down to Arizona to watch his first company-funded test. It wasn’t the scene you might expect. Taser International set up a lab near their headquarters at a veterinary clinic.  
Mike Leoneisio:We spent the whole day out there with pigs and in the back of a sweltering hot metal truck in the Arizona heat.  
Nick Berardini:The test took place inside a big trailer parked in the parking lot. Mike told me how he watched as Taser scientists, took the pigs, sedated them, then laid them out on tables.  
Mike Leoneisio:Basically setup like he would go into surgery.  
Nick Berardini:Pigs are often used in medical research because their bodies are similar to humans. Mike told me the pigs were sprawled out on tables in the back of a truck. Taser scientists hooked them up to ventilators to measure their oxygen levels. They stuck electrodes on their bodies to get a baseline measure of the pigs’ heartbeats on an EKG machine. Mike told me he looked around. He didn’t tell anyone that because he had once been a paramedic he knew how to read the beeping machines and numbers on screens.  
Mike Leoneisio:They had no idea of my background and they had no idea that when I walked into that study, I knew exactly what I was looking at.  
Nick Berardini:Mike describes how they shock the pigs over and over for hours, taking measurements, studying the effects, and monitoring for safety.  
Mike Leoneisio:One session in particular, we shocked the pig. Well, it was actually, it was a series of two shocks.  
Nick Berardini:He told me it had been a long day and he noticed that after so many shocks, this pig was in really bad shape.  
Mike Leoneisio:We didn’t check a pulse, and immediately following that, we shocked it again, and this time we shocked it into asystole.  
Nick Berardini:Asystole is basically a flat line. Mike says, the pig’s heart stopped. It died.  
Mike Leoneisio:Pig went straight into flat line, and then that was basically the end of the test. I mean, we were done.  
Nick Berardini:So you see this pig go into asystole. Were you surprised?  
Mike Leoneisio:Oh, absolutely. That’s not supposed to happen. I mean cardiac effects, they told us for years that this doesn’t have cardiac effects.  
Nick Berardini:He told me he turned to the two taser scientists in charge of the study.  
Mike Leoneisio:I said, “That’s not supposed to happen.” And they just kind of chuckled and said, “No, no, that happens. We’ve seen that before.” I was like, “What do you mean you’ve seen that before?” And he says, “Yeah, that happens.” And I was like, “Wow.” I said, “So when you publish the study associated with this event today, are you going to note that the pig was shocked into asystole?” And the response was, “Well, we don’t handle that end of it. That’s not our job.”  
Nick Berardini:From Mike’s perspective, Taser scientists were acting like it was just another day at the office. Mike says he talked to everyone he could on Tasers research team.  
Mike Leoneisio:“How are you addressing this?” They initially said, “Well, cardiac capture is not a big deal.” And that, that really got me.  
Nick Berardini:These studies showed that the taser could interfere with a regular heartbeat, Cardiac capture, and Mike knew cops around the country who carried a taser were largely trained to think the weapon couldn’t do this.  
Mike Leoneisio:They believed what they had been told and what they had been taught. We’re not talking about a bunch of electrical engineers here, we’re talking about a bunch of cops. We’re talking about using a weapon that’s not designed to do this, being used by a person who’s not trained in any kind of real medicine, maybe first aid if we’re lucky, out in an uncontrolled setting, and you’re telling me that cardiac capture’s no big deal. And that was a real turning point for me.  
Nick Berardini:Mike says he began to ask questions even to Rick Smith.  
Mike Leoneisio:“Why don’t we know about this? Why aren’t you reporting it?” And I just never was able to get a satisfactory answer to those kinds of questions.  
Nick Berardini:Matt Masters, the Kansas City police officer whose son was tased by another cop, hadn’t heard of the pig study. He believed the taser was safe. So you can see why he was confused when the doctors told Matt that it was the taser that stopped Bryce’s heart, but Matt hardly had time to think about it. His son was lying in a hospital bed unconscious. It would be three days before Bryce woke up.  
Matt Masters:He didn’t have a very good memory. We would tell him the story. I mean 20 minutes, 30 minutes later, “Why am I here?” And we’d be like, “We just told you. Don’t you remember? This is what happened. You got stopped by a cop and you got tased.” And he’s like looking like, “What?”  
Nick Berardini:Bryce’s face was swollen. Doctors suspected his jaw had been dislocated and popped back into place. Matt and Stacey were so wrapped up in Bryce’s coma those first three days that they hadn’t focused on the details of why he was in a coma. It turns out the FBI was interested too. Within hours of the incident, agents started investigating whether the cop who pulled Bryce over and tasered him violated his civil rights. And soon after Bryce woke up from his coma, they came to the hospital to see him.  
Stacy Masters:But I’m thinking we’re kind of in the middle of something right now. Maybe this can wait a couple of days, but they wouldn’t wait. They were like, “We understand, but we still want to talk right now.”  
Nick Berardini:Over the course of several visits, the FBI agents took pictures of Bryce’s messed-up face, his broken teeth and the two little red bumps that showed where he’d been tasered on his chest. The agents knew exactly where to look for Bryce’s injuries to the point that Matt and Stacey got the sense that the FBI knew something they didn’t, and it was true. The agents told them they knew what happened that day. There was video of the entire incident, but the agents told Matt and Stacey they wouldn’t be able to see it until the investigation was over. When the Masters finally left the hospital, Matt had the space to think about what had happened, and that conversation with the surgeon who told him tasers could cause cardiac arrest.  
Matt Masters:At first it was kind of like denial, like, that can’t happen. And then I just started researching on my own, Googling taser stuff and looking at videos and looking up court cases and things that had happened around the country.  
Nick Berardini:That’s when Matt started to read studies he’d never heard about before, ones that completely contradicted the studies he was familiar with from taser training. These studies clearly showed the tasers electric current could override someone’s regular heartbeat. It could lead to a cardiac arrest, and it hit Matt. Wasn’t some myth, it was science, and yet the only reason he was learning about the danger was because his own son got hurt.  
Matt Masters:Nobody ever told us any of this. When I first got trained in, I want to say around 2004-ish, fast-forward to 2014, 10 years later, there was no change in what I was trained in 2004 to 2014.  
Nick Berardini:If Matt didn’t know a taser could possibly cause a cardiac arrest, why would the guy who shot his son in the chest with a taser know?  
Matt Masters:And then I started doubting myself and really thinking, well, maybe he really didn’t do anything wrong.  
Nick Berardini:Matt wondered if this was all a tragic mistake. Maybe the cop who tased his son, Timothy Runnels, was just following his training. That is until Matt was finally able to watch the video of what happened to his son. The video shows Runnels pulling Bryce over in front of his friend Curtis’s house. Runnels goes to the passenger side of the car first. He demands that Bryce roll down the window, but it’s broken. Runnels then crosses over to Bryce’s side.  
Bryce Masters:[inaudible 00:11:17].  
Timothy Runnels:Is this one open?  
Bryce Masters:Yeah. What’s he doing?  
Timothy Runnels:Get out.  
Bryce Masters:[inaudible 00:11:21].  
Timothy Runnels:Out now.  
Nick Berardini:Runnels opens Bryce’s door.  
Bryce Masters:Am I under a arrest?  
Timothy Runnels:Out. I’m going to pull you out if you don’t get out.  
Nick Berardini:He opens the door and says, “I’m going to pull you out if you don’t get out.” He reaches into the car and starts to pull Bryce out by the collar of his shirt. But Bryce grabs the steering wheel and Runnels loses his grip.  
Timothy Runnels:[inaudible 00:11:43]. Get out. Do you really want to get tased right here in the middle of your car? Get your (beep) out now.  
Nick Berardini:Runnels tries to pull Bryce out one more time.  
Bryce Masters:Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?  
Timothy Runnels:Give me your hand. You’re under arrest.  
Bryce Masters:For what? For what? For what?  
Nick Berardini:Runnels steps back about two feet and pulls out his taser. He points it at Bryce.  
Timothy Runnels:All right, fine, just get out. Out. Out right now. Out of the car.  
Nick Berardini:You can hear the familiar rhythmic sound of the taser. Bryce steps out of the driver door. His arms tense and stiff at his side as the taser’s electric current pulses through his body at 19 times a second.  
Timothy Runnels:Taser deployment. On the ground. Out of the car, on the ground. On the ground.  
Bryce Masters:Ow.  
Timothy Runnels:Told you. Hands behind your back.  
Nick Berardini:Bryce is not moving on the screen as Runnels handcuffs him. The click, click, click still ticking. Finally, after about 20 seconds, it stops. A taser cycle only lasts for five seconds. This was the moment when Matt first understood that Bryce had been tased more than once. That Runnels had held down on the trigger tasering Bryce for at least 20 seconds straight. In the video, Runnels yanks Bryce up by his arms. He drags him behind Bryce’s car toward the curb, and he throws Bryce handcuffed on his face.  
Bryce Masters:Oh, oh, oh.  
Nick Berardini:Almost one year to the day after Runnels tased Bryce he pleaded guilty in federal court to violating Bryce’s civil rights. It was for dropping Bryce on his face, not for tasing him. The prosecution agreed the taser shot was reasonable and within common police practice. Runnels was sentenced to four years in prison.  
 Matt told me about how a couple of months later he attended an annual in-service training on tasers, kind of like an annual refresher course for the Kansas City PD that would go over any changes in case law or new information from the previous year. Matt thought Bryce’s case would come up during the session.  
 He described how he sat in the back of the room and watched patiently as the instructor went over the same talking points he’d always heard. But the moment Matt says he was waiting for, when they would go over what happened to Bryce and bring up that there was a chance the taser could cause cardiac arrest, that warning never came up. He told me he raised his hand. He pointed out that the risks of cardiac arrest were very real. Hell, they were personal.  
Matt Masters:And you’re sitting there going, “Hey, my kid got tased and went into cardiac arrest. If you need somebody to talk to, come talk to this guy.”  
Nick Berardini:Matt says, the instructor told him in front of the entire class that he was simply teaching the slides that Taser International provided. Matt warned the other cops in the room they weren’t getting the full story. That taser training clarified a lot for Matt. That’s where he changed his mind about who was to blame for what.  
 Yes, Timothy Runnels was responsible for being cruel and brutal, and he was going to prison for it. But what happened to Bryce wasn’t just on Runnels. Now, Matt decided Taser International was responsible for misleading hundreds of thousands of cops all over the world, making them think they had a weapon that couldn’t kill. Taser International was responsible for Bryce’s brain damage and he wanted to make them pay.  
Al Letson:Coming up, Nick meets the team of lawyers ready to take the company to court, and the company doubles down.  
Rick Smith:Are chest hits with the Taser dangerous? And the answer to that is definitively no.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. When Matt Masters decided he was going to sue Taser International, he wanted to learn as much about the company as possible. So he collected articles in court documents from wrongful death suits, and there was one lawyer whose name kept coming up, John Burton. John had studied the company’s every move.  
John Burton:They had convinced their customer base, which are law enforcement agencies, that this device was absolutely safe and that anybody who says differently is just trying to take this great tool away from you and is probably some ACLU liberal pinko who wants to take your car away or something or make [inaudible 00:00:51] can’t eat hamburgers.  
Al Letson:John first took the company to court in 2005. Three years later he’d win his first case. He worked with his partner Peter Williamson.  
Peter Williamson:I mean, the amount of time we spent researching and studying, I can’t even calculate the amount of hours we spent.  
Al Letson:But their victory was based on an argument that was hard to prove in most other cases. So John and Peter went looking for a new strategy. They wanted to find proof that the Taser could kill and proof that Taser International knew about it and didn’t warn anyone. Reporter Nick Berardini has the rest of the story.  
Nick Berardini:John and Peter started with the Taser’s electric current. Was it strong enough to affect the heart? They dug through Taser International’s research and the company’s training material and zeroed in on how the Taser delivers an electric shock. Even though it seems like the shock delivered by a Taser is constant, the electricity actually comes in extremely short, fast waves, and at the peak of one of those waves, the electric current was high. Once John understood this, he noticed that Taser’s lawyers and master instructors referred to the average current when they explained how safe the weapon was.  
John Burton:I mean, this would be typical of Taser propaganda that maybe fooled me at first.  
Nick Berardini:Using average current would be like trying to argue your way out of a speeding ticket using your average speed. Like after you got caught driving 85 in a 55, you told the cop, I was just stopped at two red lights. You should measure my average speed. John realized the peak current was much higher, much more dangerous than the average. This is how the company made the Taser look weaker than a Christmas tree bulb. That’s when they go back to a study they had overlooked before, one of the pig studies.  
John Burton:These studies of these pigs show that there’s cardiac capture, so I was really shocked that the science actually supported that.  
Nick Berardini:This was the proof that the Taser’s electric current was strong enough to override a normal heartbeat and speed it up, sometimes causing death. But more importantly, the studies showed the company had known for at least two years that the Taser could affect someone’s heart and they had not warned their customers. It was exactly what John and Peter needed. In 2009, Taser International was staring down the barrel of over 40 separate lawsuits. Even the Canadian government was investigating them after someone died in the Vancouver airport after being tased. Peter Williamson decided it was a good time to offer Taser a chance at Legal Surrender.  
Peter Williamson:We actually approached Mike Brave.  
Nick Berardini:Mike Brave one, of Taser’s lawyers.  
Peter Williamson:And we said to Mike Brave, “I tell you what, we’re going to make you an offer. You resolve the few cases at that point that we had, and we’ll sit down with you and we’ll rewrite your warnings for you. And if we do that, you’re going to insulate yourself from all future cases and you’ll settle the cases that we have with us and we’ll be done and we’ll move on in our lives to other things.” And he said, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” I don’t know how long it was after that, probably maybe a month or so after, and we got an email from Mike Brave and the email, it just contained three initials, NFW. That was their response. So at that point we said, “Okay, game’s on.”  
Nick Berardini:What does NFW mean?  
Peter Williamson:No [inaudible 00:04:37] way. And that decision ended up paying major dividends for us. I’ll just leave it at that.  
Nick Berardini:What Peter means is that Taser kept fighting them. If the company kept refusing to warn cops, they were going to keep paying it.  
Peter Williamson:And somebody got the clue, “Hey, we’ve got to do something here or we’re going to keep getting sued.”  
Nick Berardini:On September 30th, 2009, Taser International issued a training bulletin that for the first time said the risk to the heart from the Taser is not zero. It also said, cops, when possible, should avoid shooting people in the chest.  
Newsreel:Maker of the Taser is now telling police officers where to shoot. This new requirement is to stay away from the head, the neck, and the chest when an officer Taser’s a suspect.  
Nick Berardini:Cops who read this bulletin who had been under the impression that the Taser was completely safe, were confused. The company immediately started getting calls and emails from cops asking for more information. This was a huge change for officers. CEO Rick Smith scheduled a 2009 version of a Zoom, a conference call with hundreds of police departments around the country.  
Speaker 2:Good day ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Taser International Incorporated customer update. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Rick Smith, CEO of Taser International. Please proceed.  
Rick Smith:Thank you very much. I want to start by addressing a couple of the questions we’ve been receiving over email. The first one is, “Are chest hits with the Taser dangerous?” And the answer to that is definitively no.  
Nick Berardini:Definitively no. Rick explained this addition to the training wasn’t because the Taser was dangerous, chest shots were just less effective than shots to the back or stomach.  
Rick Smith:But the real biggest reason here in my mind is risk management and avoiding the controversy.  
Nick Berardini:He was basically saying new training recommendations were just to keep the greedy lawyers and anti-cop critics off all their backs.  
Rick Smith:Another question we got [inaudible 00:06:55].  
Nick Berardini:If you still needed to shoot someone in the chest with a Taser, the company would be by your side. Taser International wasn’t backing down or abandoning officers.  
Rick Smith:… walking away. “Will Taser help defend officers where there’s chest shots involved?” And the answer is unequivocally yes. We pride ourselves that we stand up both for our technology and for officers here.  
Nick Berardini:Cops were looking for truth, but there wasn’t any real dialogue about research results or science.  
Police officer:So there is an acknowledgement that there’s a minute possibility that shot to the chest could result in cardiac arrest?  
Rick Smith:I think the better way that I would answer that, not better, but from the company’s perspective is we cannot prove it’s zero. And that seems to be [inaudible 00:07:44].  
Nick Berardini:Why didn’t Rick just tell them it’s rare but it’s a real risk. That’s not what happened.  
Police officer:Thanks to all of you at Taser for what you’ve done for law enforcement.  
Rick Smith:Thank you. Hey, and I would say sorry for this situation. I don’t enjoy it either. Unfortunately, we live in a country where you spill hot coffee in your lap and you can sue for $10 million. So appreciate your understanding and support.  
Nick Berardini:This call happened five years before Matt Masters son Bryce was tased and went into cardiac arrest. Until then, he still believed the Taser was safe. Matt wanted John Burton to bring Bryce’s case against Taser International.  
Matt Masters:I called John’s office and got through to him and just kind of explained to him who I was.  
Nick Berardini:He raced through the details. He was convinced that Officer Runnels didn’t understand how dangerous the Taser was when he shot Bryce and that Taser International was legally responsible for what had happened. John looked through everything Matt sent him and he knew it wouldn’t be an easy case. Taser International could now point to all these new warnings that had been added to its thick training packet, a laundry list of fine print that insulated the company from liability. But if Matt wanted to try, they could sue both Taser International and Timothy Runnels together. They could argue that Taser International’s warnings weren’t enough to teach Runnels that the Taser was dangerous.  
 In March, 2018, they deposed Runnels to pin down what he knew about the cardiac risk when he tased Bryce in the chest.  
John Burton:What was your training and information on the potential for cardiac arrest as it related to chest shots that were close to the heart muscle?  
Timothy Runnels:Chest shots are still appropriate if it’s the option provided.  
John Burton:That was still okay under the City of Independence, correct?  
Timothy Runnels:Yes.  
Nick Berardini:More than two hours into the deposition, Taser International’s lawyer takes her turn and it’s hard for me to hear the company defending or standing up for Officer Runnels, in her line of questioning.  
Lawyer:They specifically say avoid chest shots when possible, right?  
Timothy Runnels:When possible, yes.  
Lawyer:And that was your understanding just by reviewing this training bulletin that you received? Correct?  
Timothy Runnels:My understanding that any shot is acceptable, it’s preferred to try to aim for lower center mass.  
Lawyer:Show me where it says any shot is acceptable in this bulletin.  
Timothy Runnels:It says when possible and also says preferred, which would indicate any area.  
Lawyer:Okay. So it doesn’t say it’s acceptable, does it?  
Nick Berardini:John Burton was infuriated by Taser’s legal strategy. The company he’d battled for so long was using the warning, he pushed them to write, to try to win a case against him.  
Lawyer:It specifically says that to reduce any risk of sudden cardiac arrest, right? And it says minimize repeated continuous or simultaneous exposures. That’s what was in the warning that you reviewed and signed off on, right?  
Timothy Runnels:Right.  
Nick Berardini:I wish I could ask Runnels about this moment, but he declined to be interviewed. What he did to Bryce was terrible, but Runnels was in prison for that crime. Taser International, on the other hand, never admitted the Taser caused Bryce’s cardiac arrest. But here was their lawyer throwing it back in his face, implying with her questions that he didn’t heed the warnings. As Peter Williamson explained to me, writing the warning in 2009 deflected the liability of the Taser from the company that made them to the cops who used them.  
Peter Williamson:Here they were, the company was formed in order to do something favorable for law enforcement. Right? We’re going to give you a device that won’t kill people and it ends up killing people. So now what they do is they put the onus on the officers.  
Nick Berardini:After the depositions, John Burton spoke with Matt.  
Matt Masters:John knew that, do we want to continue this route and go after both or do we want to go after the easy money, which is Timothy Runnels and his insurance company?  
Nick Berardini:They dropped Taser from the lawsuit.  
Matt Masters:It was much easier to pin it all on Runnels and say he shouldn’t have shot the kid and held the trigger down for 24 seconds, which is all true.  
Nick Berardini:Whether or not Runnels knew his Taser could be lethal, didn’t matter. He signed training documents that warned him and he fired the Taser anyway. Two years earlier in the criminal case, Officer Runnels wasn’t even charged for tasing Bryce and causing his cardiac arrest, only for dropping him onto his face. Now, in the civil case, Bryce’s lawyers had to prove that the Taser shot on its own was excessive force. Fortunately for the Masters, their attorney called an expert witness to the stand, a former cop himself who’d seen firsthand how dangerous the Taser could be. Mike Leonesio, a now-retired use-of-force expert from Oakland PD.  
 Mike explained to the jury that every five-second Taser shot was its own individual use of force. So even if you thought the first five seconds was reasonable, the next 15 seconds of Taser shock was unnecessary. Runnels should only have tasered Bryce for as long as he needed to get him into handcuffs.  
Mike Leonesio:I don’t think that he understood that that weapon was capable of affecting the human heart. And I think unfortunately, there’s still a lot of officers out there today who, because of their department training, don’t understand the capabilities of this weapon.  
Nick Berardini:Runnels would be found guilty again, and Bryce Masters would be awarded $6.5 million. Stacy Masters, Bryce’s, mom remembers what a relief it all was.  
Stacy Masters:We had made it and it wasn’t all for nothing and we didn’t end up with nothing for Bryce’s future, nothing to make sure he was taken care of. And it was quite literally payday.  
Nick Berardini:They had imagined this moment for years, Rick Smith at the defense table and listening as the jury found his company guilty, but Rick wasn’t there. Timothy Runnels was alone.  
Matt Masters:It’s hard for me, because I know Rick Smith is a father. I mean, there’s crazy numbers out there that at least a thousand people have died from tasers. How do you live with yourself? Do you live with yourself that, “Oh, I’m saving lives.” You’re not saving lives, a hundred percent.  
Nick Berardini:Do you feel like they got away with it a little bit?  
Matt Masters:Oh yeah, a hundred percent.  
Stacy Masters:Mm-hmm. By design.  
Matt Masters:They got away with everything.  
Al Letson:In 2017, Taser International was renamed to Axon Enterprise. The company still supplies tasers to police departments all over the country, and it has also expanded into a new market, surveillance technology. Think body cams, drones and artificial intelligence that can analyze the footage their cameras record. Today, Axon is worth over $45 billion and it doesn’t just serve cops, it’s customer base now includes civilian markets, like hospitals, retail stores, and even schools. In the 15 years, Nick has reported on Rick Smith’s company, Rick has never agreed to speak to Nick directly. The Masters family still lives in Kansas City. Matt was promoted, now he’s a lead investigator working on drug cases, sometimes in collaboration with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Bryce used some of the money from his lawsuit to buy a house close to his parents. He and his longtime girlfriend are expecting their first child next Spring. You can hear more about Axon Enterprise and how it became the most powerful company in policing on Nick’s series, Absolute Taser Incorporated.  
 Listen wherever you get your podcasts. The Absolute Taser Incorporated podcast is a production of Lava for Good in collaboration with Signal Company No. 1. Their team includes executive producers Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wortis, senior producer Kara Kornhaber, writer and producer Hannah Beal, and producer Jackie Pauley. Story editing was done by Marianne McCune and fact checking by Dania Suleman. Additional reporting by Matt Stroud, engineering and sound design by Joe Plourde, with music composed by Alexis Cuadrado.  
 Our lead producer for this week’s show is Steven Rascon. Jenny Casas edited the show. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda, and they had help from the amazing Julia Haney. Taki Telonidis is our deputy executive producer, and our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Support for Reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, Smith Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember there is always more to the story.  

Jenny Casas is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She was previously a narrative audio producer at the New York Times. Before that, she reported on the ways that cities systematically fail their people, for WNYC Studios, USA Today, City Bureau, and St. Louis Public Radio. Casas is based in Chicago.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting (d/b/a Foundation for National Progress), where she advises the organization on its full range of legal activities, including counseling reporters on newsroom matters (newsgathering, libel, privacy, subpoenas), advising the C-level on business matters, and providing legal support to the board. She has litigated on various issues on behalf of the organization, including arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to CIR, Victoria worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the New York Times. She also clerked on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She holds degrees from Columbia University, Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. She teaches at Berkeley Law School as an adjunct professor and is a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center. She is barred in California, New York, and New Jersey.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.