When she came to, 4 police officers were pinning her down. Scared and disoriented, she begged to be let go & fought to get free.
In 2012, Tiara Helm, 17, was at a concert an hour outside of Birmingham, Alabama, when she collapsed, gripped by a seizure.
The officers, who initially tried to keep her from hurting herself, decided she had become combative. They tightened their holds and put her in a headlock.
A 5th officer warned her to calm down. She cursed at him. He then pressed a Taser into Helm’s abdomen and pulled the trigger.
Helm never got an apology or an acknowledgement of mistreatment. Eventually, she turned to the last resort: a lawsuit.
There was no internal investigation. The officer who used the Taser was promoted about a year later.
When Helm went back to school after the incident, a rumor spread among Helm’s peers that her seizure was drug-induced. She quit school and soccer.
She also started cutting herself, carving the words “why me” inside her left forearm. It made her feel something besides numb, she said.
By the time the civil rights suit was filed in 2015, Helm had tried heroin and meth.
Every year, thousands file lawsuits against the police in federal court. It can take years to go to trial. Most don’t get that far. Federal judges dismiss the majority of cases in favor of police.
Officers are often protected by “qualified immunity” — a legal doctrine that shields government workers from being sued for their actions on the job, except in rare circumstances.
In Helm’s case, the appeals court ruled in March 2021 that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity, paving the way for a trial.
This past October, almost 7 years after the incident, Helm’s case was finally heard before a jury. She’d just celebrated her 24th birthday.