But we don’t KNOW there was oxygen. It’s not in the news story about the incident. We also don’t know how many police responded — it’s not in the news story.
We’d know a lot more if we had the police report, but I haven’t been able to find that online, and the local news (from my internet searches) has been ignoring the story and the lawsuit, which makes me think it’s more of a joke than we might think.
Remember, we seem to know the story because someone filed a complaint, and it’s been posted to a bunch of blogs, some of which are pretty anti-police. Anybody can put anything in a complaint, and it seems if the police department in El Reno were facing a serious lawsuit, the El Reno paper would have mentioned it by now — and I can’t find any indication they have.
So I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether there are facts in agreement that we can use to evaluate better. I agree that 12 police and stepping on oxygen hoses would be bad — but I have no independent verification that either of those claims are true.
What I do have is a credible news story that shows some of the complaint to either be false or misleading, and certainly missing significant and important mitigating details.
I imagine things from a similar, but different, point of view.
To start with, the original 911 caller must have said something to get such a response in the first place. I suspect that he told them about her knife, but that’s just a guess. The 911 recording likely won’t be released until trial, even though it is public record.
As far as oxygen goes, there likely was oxygen, because it would not be mentioned otherwise. But this could mean three things. Either an oxygen generator, which is low risk, low pressure, and has to be sucked into the lungs, and generally safe; or an oxygen tank, which is either a small tank or a large one, with proportional risk, both from the raw oxygen, and from the large, high pressure tank which if it gets its head knocked off is as dangerous as a flying torpedo.
The third alternative is an oxygen tent, which is extremely dangerous, but wouldn’t be used in this situation, as treading on its tube wouldn’t be notice for quite a while.
Now this being said, both small and large tanks usually have lots of tube, which would be easy to step on without knowing it. So that is a minor thing in this situation.
After that, the issue is how to get someone off a bed who is holding, and menacing, with a knife. Not easy. If they had one available, a stun gun would probably be a better alternative than a Taser, but they probably didn’t have one.