Dallas County Sheriff’s Deputy Tased, Threatened Handcuffed Man, Arrest Warrant Says

Newly released documents paint a disturbing picture of the incident that led to the arrest of a Dallas County Sheriff's Department deputy Thursday evening. Deputy Austin Palmer is charged with assault causing bodily injury and official oppression, both Class A misdemeanors, after he allegedly tased and threatened a handcuffed man in October.

Juanita Morales first complained on behalf of her son Jeremiah Ramos in December. She told the DCSO's internal affairs division that she'd been sitting in her living room with the front door open on Oct. 7 when she saw two white men walk across her front yard.

One of the men, according to Morales, asked her son if he remembered him. Ramos said no, but the two men handcuffed him and walked him away from the house.

Once Ramos was in the backseat of the patrol car, he repeatedly told the deputies that he wasn't guilty of evading arrest, Morales said, before one of the deputies tased him.

"Mom, I didn't do anything to deserve this," Ramos said in a letter from Dallas County Jail to Morales. "They just did it to me for nothing."

Ramos told sheriff's deputies in a statement that Palmer asked him if he was aware that he'd almost hit him with a car. Ramos told the officer that he'd never seen him before, but the said officer refused to believe him. According to Ramos, the officer then tased him in the stomach, and told him that if he said another word on the way to the Dallas County Jail that he would tase him in the penis. 

Deputy Phillip Koenig, Palmer's partner, told deputies that they'd attempted to arrest a man they believed to be Ramos on outstanding warrants on Oct. 1. Ramos, Koenig said, sped away from an attempted traffic stop and almost hit the officers.

Sheriff's deputies found injuries on Ramos' stomach that could've been caused by a taser.

Koenig verified Ramos story, including the tasing and the threats made by Palmer in an interview with sheriff's deputies. Koenig said that the two had not filed a use of force report after Ramos' arrest and that Ramos was adamant that he had not tried to run Palmer over.

There is no body camera footage of the incident, according to the sheriff's office.

“When we have issues that we need to address, we’re going to be accountable to ourselves. Good, bad, indifferent, we’re going to hold ourselves accountable,” Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown said Friday. "We don't see this as being a training issue. We see this as being an isolated incident where someone made a bad decision."