Previously on Taser Incorporated.
I remember looking at the screen and I said, that's capture.
There was no change in what I was trained in four to twenty fourteen.
None of these cases has the person died while being hit with the taser.
You're saying that this was a coincidence.
They would have died anyway.
In every single case, these people would have died anyway.
I walked into Matt and Stacy Master's house on a sticky July night, about a month after Timothy Runolds was sentenced to four years in prison. Matt was sitting at their kitchen table. That big accordion folder he'd stuffed full of taser articles and court papers for years was spilled out in front of him. Pages and pages marked with handwritten notes in red ink and highlighted passages yellow and orange marker.
That's what blows my mind and then just infuriates me.
I mean, I started skimming the titles covering the kitchen table and began to laugh. I realized we were too obsessive sitting down to compare notes I was.
Told, And as I moved along through my own research, and it was so eye opening that I'm like, why the fucks don't departments know this, Like where is the disconnect? Where is Like.
I was one of the few people in the world who actually understood what Matt was looking at. Like seeing one paper effects of cocaine intoxication on the threshold for stun gun induction of ventricular fibrillation, I'd go, oh, yeah, that's the study from the Cleveland clinic that first discovered cardiac capture. Or another Butler versus Taser International. It's one of the first lawsuits that exposed the Taser's cardiac risks.
Like cops believed everything, everything that Tayser told.
Me, and like now I think I listened to Matt Rant for hours. Timothy Runnalds was in prison, but now it was time for the fight. Matt really wanted.
I want to be in that.
He told me Bryce was going to file a lawsuit against Taser International. Matt wanted the company to pay for what happened to his son. This is absolute. Season one, Taser incorporated a story about unchecked power. I'm Nick Beredini. Episode five n FW. There was one lawyer whose name kept coming up in the trial transcripts Matt put in his folder, John Burton. He was like the Michael Jordan of suing Taser International, and he'd studied Tasers every move.
They had convinced their customer base, which are law enforcement agencies, that this device was absolutely safe and that any who says differently is just trying to take this great tool away from you and is probably some acou liberal pinko who wants to take your car away or something or bagas so you can eat Hamburgers.
If anyone fit the stereotype of liberal pinko, it was John. John grew up in Pasadena. He became a hard charging civil rights attorney who hung portraits of famous jazz musicians on the walls of his office. He even ran for governor of California in two thousand and three, supported by the socialist Equality Party.
I got like seven thousand votes. I remember Gary Coleman finished ahead of me and Arianne Huffington.
John took his first taser case back in two thousand and five, nine years before Officer Runnels Taste Brice Masters. This is when news stories about grandma's and kids getting tasered and people dying from the weapon were becoming more and more common. Taser International was in an escalating battle
with critics who thought the taser could kill. The company was spending lots of money on legal fees defending themselves and what they called the war against Taser, and CEO Rick Smith was in the news defending tasers all the time, like when he answered questions on CBS News of.
The cases that we've seen, we strongly believe and our medical experts strongly believed the taser had no causal effect in those fatalities.
In one of his first taser cases, John represented the family of a forty year old man named Robert Heston, who died after police tasered him twenty five times for more than a minute straight. John brought on his friend Peter Williamson. They were a team, two men with the same job and the same goal do what no legal team had done before and defeat Taser in court. They even sound similar. Well.
First of all, they had had tremendous success in litigation before John and I got involved. I think was seventy six cases where they had been able to kick the cases out of court on summary judgment.
It was actually seventy and zero. But Peter is right. So far, no lawyer had ever been able to convince a jury or a judge that Taser International was responsible for someone's death.
So they had a certain arrogance and swagger about them that, hey, we can't be defeated, right, And who were these guys coming into court and you know, fighting us? And as I've often said, when I think back on this litigation, I wouldn't put it on the same level, but it was akin to tobacco litigation. It was a company that absolutely refused to concede any point whatsoever, fought everything tooth and nail, appealed everything. They would not give an inch
on any of this. And you know, they got lawyers who had the same kind of mentality that you know, we're too big, you can't beat us.
Taser's lawyers and executives had a swagger in part because they saw themselves as the good guys, providing a technology that made a violent world safer every day. CEO Rick Smith explained his personal frustration to a reporter from GQ magazine in twenty ten. They quote him saying, we're saving lives, don't you get it? And then he compares himself to Batman quote this sort of tragic thing where he's trying to stop the criminals, but the media and the general
public think he's a vigilante, a bad guy. But John and Peter didn't see Rick Smith as batman. It seemed to them that the taser played some role in killing their client's son, Robert Heston, So they filled their offices with boxes and boxes of documents everything they could learn about the company and the weapon.
I mean, the amount of time we spent researching and studying. I can't even calculate the amount of hours we spent.
They were looking for two pieces of information, proof that the taser could kill, and proof that Taser International knew about it and didn't warn cops. John and Peter combed through what felt like endless pages of medical studies spread out around the office, and after a while, they came upon a couple of independent studies that suggested the taser might cause this thing called acidosis. Simply put, acidosis is a dangerous condition where lactic acid builds up in your
blood from muscle contractions. One taser shot won't do much, but a taser shot that lasts sixty seconds that's roughly a thousand muscle contractions in one minute. In John and Peter's case, Robert Heston had been tasered for over a minute. Now they had their strategy. Before they went to trial, they had depositions, and this is where they met Rick Smith for the first time. John especially remembers reading Rick's resume. It was pages long going back to high school.
And then it had its SAT scores going into college. It's college admission scores. There is a guy who was, you know, the CEO of a publicly traded company, and he's putting his SAT scores on his resume. I wasn't. I wasn't that in press because they were lower than mine.
But you know, as you can imagine, things between the two sides got ugly in a hurry.
I mean, we would get into screaming matches in some of these depositions. It was unbelievable.
I've seen over one hundred hours of footage of depositions from this case and others, and no doubt they were contentious, but there isn't much screaming. I'd say it was more like pissing contests.
We take one last bathroom break. It can be very fascinating.
Actually I'd prefer not. If you can hold on for twenty minutes, then I.
Can twenty minutes. I cannot assure that I can't answer well cognitively and accurately. We've been going for well over an hour.
Oh no, when I've been going for a lot less than an hour.
This time Peter got the sense that to Rick, these cases were a waste of his time.
He never ever showed any empathy for anybody in any of these cases. He could have cared less. Yes, it was beneath him, for certain. Never, once ever did I hear him say anything or do anything that would suggest to me that he had any empathy for anybody. He only cared about the bottom line of his company, and that was it.
The depositions only made John and Peter want to win more. In previous cases against Taser International, other lawyers had tried to argue that exposure to the tasers electric current was directly causing cardiac arrest, like sticking a fork in a wall, but Taser had lots of research to show the electric current was too weak to really do that. No lawyer had ever won an argument against Taser International by focusing on acidosis until John and Peter made their case to
the jury. They said the company failed to warn cops that so many shots in a row could cause acidosis. It was an emotional, intense back and forth in the courtroom. Taser's lawyers claimed Heston's death was a classic case of excited delirium because he was high on methamphetamine when he died. They said the Taser had nothing to do with killing him. But after listening to both sides make their arguments, the
jury found the Taser partially responsible for Heston's death. On June sixth, two thousand and eight, John and Peter became the first lawyers to beat Taser International in a wrongful death case. It made headlines across the country, turned John and Peter into the Taser lawyers, the guys who finally got a court to say on the record that the
Taser could kill. Their win against Taser brought John and Peter more cases families who claimed the Taser killed or injured their loved one, and though they'd gotten that first big legal win, it was looking like the Heston case might be a one off because acidosis didn't actually explain all these other cases. Many of these were cases where sober or healthy people were shot in the chest, sometimes just once or twice, not long enough to cause acidosis.
So John and Peter went back to the pile of research papers, and John noticed something he'd missed before.
I mean, this would be typical of Taser propaganda that maybe fooled me at first.
It was about 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. 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.
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 eighty five and a fifty five, you told the cop that's bullshit, Officer, 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.
Before this, he and Peter had been focused on acidosis. But now that they understood how strong the taser current was, they went back to their research with a new question, is the taser's current strong enough to affect the heart? And that's when they hit the jackpot. The information they were searching for was you guessed it in a pig study.
I told you I.
Wasn't going to use profanity in this interview, but I just went holy shit.
Taser International funded a study published in two thousand and six by a prominent doctor at the Cleveland Clinic named Patrick Chu. Doctor Chew and his team gave five pigs cocaine and shocked them to see what would happen. The pig hearts were visible on an ultrasound machine, so they
could see everything during the taser shots. The cocaine didn't make the pigs any more likely to have a cardiac arrest, but buried in the studies conclusion was something that changed everything for John and Peter.
These studies of these pigs show that there's cardiac capture. So I was really shocked that the science actually supported that.
The taser's electric current was strong enough to override a normal heartbeat and speed it up, sometimes causing death.
That's a much different kind of thing than the acidosis because that could just happen instantly.
This study was exactly what John and Peter needed. Proof the company had known about the risk of cardiac capture for at least two years. It was buried right there in Taser's own research, and they still weren't warning cops. Around this time, John had a new client, the family of seventeen year old Darryl Turner. Daryl was tasered in the chest for thirty seven seconds straight. He collapsed to the floor of the grocery store where he worked and died.
The entire incident was caught on video. It seemed like a clear case of taser induced cardiac capture. The taser sped Darryl's heart up and killed him. Soon they were back at it, meeting with Rick Smith again in depositions.
So what you're saying, I mean, I'm trying to understand what you're saying. What you're saying is that the use of the taser had nothing to do with the cardiac arrest in this case. Is that your testimony.
Taser International's argument was that Darryl Turner had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition where the heart muscles thicken and can cause death, and that he happened to die because of this condition. At the exact moment he got tased. Grilled Rick about it.
What I'm saying is that, to the best of our knowledge, this does not appear that the direct electric effects of the taser would be the most likely cause of the cardiac arrest, and that this case is were similar to the cases of sudden cardiac death in high school athletes. It's not a fully understood phenomenon why young, otherwise healthy looking people collapse and die during physically stressful events.
While John was litigating on behalf of Darryl Turner, he and Peter kept taking on more cases, and many of these cases were headed to trial. Darryl Turner's case wouldn't go to trial for another couple of years, but it was clear John and Peter found a blueprint that threatened the company. The taser could affect the heart, the company had the science that proved it. When the Turner case finally went before a jury in twenty eleven, John and
Peter won easily, and it cost the company millions. In two thousand and nine, Taser International was staring down the barrel of over forty separate lawsuits. If even a handful of those cases were as clear cut as Darryl Turner's death, Tayser would likely lose a fortune. 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.
We actually approached Mike Brave.
Mike Brave, one of Taser's lawyers.
And we said to Mike Brave, I'll tell you what. We're going to make you an offer. You resolved 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 know, 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 just said it just contained three initials n f W. That was their response. So at that point we said, okay, games on, you know, no fucking way. And that decision ended up paying major dividends for us. I'll just leave it at that.
What Peter means is that Taser kept fighting them. If the company kept refusing to warn cops, they were going to keep paying for it.
And somebody got the clue, Hey, we've got to do something here or we're gonna keep getting sued.
Taser International would eventually make changes to the design of its weapon too, and their words improve safety margins. They would issue a new version of the taser that shut off automatically after five seconds, so an officer would have to repress the trigger again to keep the electric current flowing longer than five seconds, and they would reduce the
electric charge by about half. But before redesigning the weapon, on September thirty, two thousand and nine, they issued their own version of a warning, a new eighteen page training update. And this is that same warning. Matt Masters was so surprised to find Taser International was telling cops the risk to the heart from the taser is not zero. They also said that cops, when possible, should avoid shooting people in the chest.
Baker 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 officers.
Copsy 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 two thousand and nine version of a zoom a conference call with hundreds of police departments around the country.
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Taser International Incorporated customer Updates. I would now like to turn the call over to mister Rick Smith, CEO of Taser International.
Lease proceed, Thank you very much.
I want to start by addressing a couple of questions we've been receiving over email. The first one is our chest hits with the taser dangerous? And the answer to that is definitively no.
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.
But the real.
Of the biggest reason here in my mind is risk management and avoiding the controversy.
He was basically saying, new training recommendations were just to keep the greedy lawyers and anti cop critics off all their backs. 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 in a way.
Will Taser helped 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 you'll recall a few years ago in Ohio Medical.
I've listened to this call so many times. Cops were looking for the truth, but there wasn't any real dialogue about research results or science. I've often wondered how things might be different if there had just been an honest conversation.
So there is an acknowledgement that there's a minute possibility that shat to the chats could result in cardiac a risk.
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 means.
Why didn't Rich just tell them it's rare, but it's a real risk. That's not what happened.
Thanks to all of you a taste for what you've done for law enforcement.
Thank you, hey, and I would say sorry for you know this situation. I don't enjoy it either. Unfortunately live in a country where you spill hot coffee in your laugh and you can see it for ten million dollars, So appreciate your understanding and support.
On the conference call, Rick tells cops that his company will always stand by any officer who needs their legal support if they still have to shoot someone in the chest. But the reality was very different. When Taser International talk to cops in that conference call, they downplayed the real risks of the weapon. Instead, they said they were just writing this warning to help everyone avoid controversy. This is a pattern I've noticed in how the company deals with cops.
In the beginning, they were calling Taser's non lethal and warning about the obvious like people falling and the taser is flammable, so if you shoot someone covered in gasoline, watch out. Over the years, they started calling tasers less lethal. They recommended officers not shoot people for longer than fifteen seconds, recommended they not shoot them in the chest, not shoot
pregnant women or people running away. They were warning about acidosis, cardiac risks, metabolic changes, just about everything, but in training, were cops actually getting the message that the taser posed any risk. About five years after this conference call, Matt Masters thought tasers were one hundred percent safe. That is until his own son went into cardiac arrest. Matt wanted John Burton to bring Bryce's case against Taser International.
I called John's office out in California and got through to him and just kind of explained to him who I was.
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. All those warnings Taser International had quietly added to their products, they gave the company an out. They could argue, it's written right here. You're not supposed to taser someone for
more than fifteen seconds at a time. You're supposed to avoid the chest. It wasn't their fault when a cop misused the product. John told Matt Bryce's case wasn't the slam dunk Matt thought it was, but he did see illegal strategy. Officer Runnels tasered Bryce with an old model of the taser that allowed him to hold down the
trigger as long as he wanted for twenty seconds. Taser International had since changed the design and reduced the charge, but the company never recalled the older teaser model that caused Bryce's cardiac arrest. Taser even stopped selling that model in twenty fourteen, the same year Bryce was shocked. John could argue they knew the old version of the taser was more dangerous. Taser International was still being negligent, so he came up with a plan to sue both Taser
International and Timothy Runnels at the same time. The more defendants at the start, the more information the lawyers can gather, and the easier it becomes to figure out who to blame. John partnered with some local Kansas City attorneys for Bryce's case, and in March of twenty eighteen, they got the chance to question Timothy Runnels for the first time. Runnels was still serving his prison sentence. A video of the deposition
shows him wearing green Department of Corrections scrubs. He's calm, what's going on?
With the taser if you hold the trigger dead.
At that point in time, I believed it would do a five second cycle.
It was your understanding that even if you continued to hold the triggered in that the person you had tased would only receive a five second cycle of current.
Yes, and our most recent training, they were talking about the new Taser, which was an automatic shut off.
Runnell says he thought he'd been given a smart battery that would give his older Taser model an automatic shut off, but this wasn't the case. Later, he has asked what he learned about chess shots from his most recent training.
What was your training and information on the potential for cardiac arrest as it related to chess shots that were close to the heart muscle?
Chess safts are still appropriate if it's the option.
Provided that was still okay under the City of Independence.
Correct.
Yes.
More than two hours into the deposition, Taser Internationals 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.
They specifically say, avoid chest shots when possible.
Right when possible.
Yes, and that was your understanding. Describe reviewing this training bulletin that you received, correct.
My understanding that any shot is acceptable. It's preferred to try to aim for lower center mass.
Show me where it says any shot is acceptable in.
This bulletin, it says when possible, and also says preferred. We can indicate any area.
So it doesn't say it's acceptable, doesn't it.
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.
They talked out of both sides of their mouth, so it depended on which side of their mouth you were on, right, because they were saying, yeah, I look right there. It says, you know it could cause cardiac capture, and hearing a Taser lawyer questioning law enforcement and raking them over the coals about it causing cardiac capture when I had spent so much of my life at that point disputing that exact point with him.
It specifically says that to reduce any risk of setting cardiac or risk right, that's what we just read in the previous.
Paragraph previous one, Yes, and.
It says minimize repeated continuous or simultaneous exposures. That's what was in the warning that you reviewed and signed off on. Right right.
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 cause 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. Bryce's cardiac arrest is your fault.
As Peter Williamson explained to me, writing the warning in two thousand and nine, deflected the liability of the taser from the company that made them to the cops who used them.
Here, they were that company was formed in order to, you know, 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.
Matt Masters watched runnels deposition afterwards.
It was weird because I thought, well, maybe Runnels missed something, but then his sergeant, Blake Moore, said the exact same thing in his deposition that we were taught that the taser couldn't cause cardiac arrest.
After the depositions, John Burton spoke with Matt Stacy and Bryce.
John knew that, like, look, we've got to make a choice. We're going to either battle Taser and all their attorneys and all the stuff they're gonna throw at you, and they're gonna you know, it's gonna be rough.
In the Hollywood version, Matt Stacy, Bryce, and John Burton take on the company in an epic legal battle to hold Rick Smith accountable for what they believed was a betrayal of cops. The climactic a Few Good Men courtroom scene where the Tom Cruise version of John Burton yells, did you know that taser could cause a cardiac arrest? And the Jack Nicholson version of Rick Smith shouts back, your goddamn I'm right I did. It'd be a good movie. But Matt, Stacey and Bryce were living in the real world.
John explained making the Hollywood version real was complicated. Maybe they could win that case, but it would be hard, and if they lost, well, they didn't want to think about how hard Bryce's life would be if they lost, there was a much easier victory.
Do we want to continue this route and go after both or do we want to go after the easy money, which is Timothy Reynolds and his insurance company.
They dropped taser from the lawsuit.
It was much easier to pen it all on Reynolds and say he shouldn't have shot the kid and held the trigger down for twenty four seconds, which is all true.
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. The trial lasted about a week. Do you remember anyone in the jury in particular? Do you make eye contact to anyone on the jury who stood out to you.
There was a guy that I remember, just a kind of a country bumpkin guy. If I remember, he had a beard, and he was kind of up in the upper left hand corner. He just made eye contact with us throughout. I really remember that he was really engaged and he seemed just like this guy that I kind of was worried to. Honestly, I was kind of worried
about him. I don't know about that guy, you know, like he just looked like he'd just come right out from the farm, you know, and he parked his truck out in a lot and came in and I just I remember thinking that guy is probably not gonna be on our side, you know.
Bryce's lawyers started the try with the dash cam video from inside runnels squad car. I was there and saw the jury members cover their mouths and shock the US Marshal guarding Runnels burst into tears and had to rush out of the courtroom after it was over 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 Leonisio, 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 fifteen seconds of taser shock was unnecessary. Ronalds should only have tasered Bryce for as long as he needed to get him into handcuffs. Today, looking back at the situation, Mike isn't sure what Ronald's knew about the weapon. Do you think he understood what might happen by tasering Bryce in the chest?
I don't think so, and I say that based on my review of all the other case materials, 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.
After Mike came Stacy, Ronald's lawyer, had tried to make it seem like Bryce wasn't hurt so badly, that he was living a normal life. But when Stacey took the stand, she just described how Bryce had changed the memory loss, mood swings, insomnia, the deep and terrifying depression. She told the jurors what Bryce was like before this all happened, and how Bryce told her he would give anything to have that version of himself back. After several emotional days,
the jury filed out to make their decision. Timothy Runnels guilty again, Bryce Masters awarded six point five million dollars. Matt made eye contact with the guy on the jury, the one who he thought might go against them.
If I remember, I think he even winked at me like, you know, like gotcha, you know type thing.
He had made it and it wasn't all for nothing, and we didn't end up with, you know, nothing for Bryce's future, nothing to make sure he was taken care of. And it was quite literally, you know, pay day.
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 Runnolds was alone.
I used to think when we first started that there was this reckoning coming. You know, it's hard for me, like because I know Rick Smith is a father. I mean, there's crazy numbers out there. At least a thousand people have died from him tasers. You know, how do you live with yourself like you do you live with yourself that.
I'm just I'm saving lives.
Oh you're really.
You're not saving lives one hundred percent?
Do you feel like they got away with it a little bit. Oh yeah, by design, he got over there.
Really.
Rick Smith loves to talk about his company using science fiction and superhero culture. Rick started out as Captain Kirk, the altruistic leader protecting a utopian society. Then as people died from the Taser, he talked about himself as Batman, a dark hero fighting for justice. But in the best superhero stories, the villains think they're the heroes. Next time on Absolute Season one, Taser Incorporated.
We want to be building technology for the society we all want to live in, and we don't want this stuff to get misused.
At one point, Rick Smith, the CEO of the company, accused me of costing them more than five hundred million dollars in shareholder value.
Then next thing I know, I'm getting these anonymous written complaints.
My thing would be the question, why didn't you tell the truth from the beginning because you knew.
Absolute Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company Number one. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and threads at Lava for Good. Follow me at Nick Beredini on Instagram and Twitter. Taser Incorporated is written and produced by me Nick Beredini. Our executive producers are Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wortis. Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Paul is our producer.
Hannah Biel is our writer and producer. Joe Plored is our sound designer. Music composed and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Marianne mckowne is our editor. Fact checking by Donya Suleman. Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and operations. Our social media director is is Marie guard Rama, our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional reporting by Matt Strapp.