Health Impact News Editor
John Kass of the Chicago Tribune reports this week that the family members of John Wrana, who died in his nursing care facility after police shot him with multiple rounds of bean bags from a shot gun, still have not received any explanation as to why he was killed.
In July of this year (2013), we reported on this incident in Park Forest, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. John Wrana was 95 years old and a World War II veteran. When paramedics showed up to transport him to a hospital to treat his urinary tract infection, he refused to go.
The paramedics then called the police, rather than ask the nursing home staff to help.
When the police arrived, they were equipped in full riot gear. Mr. Wrana got around with a walker and was reportedly sitting down at the time. He still refused to go to the hospital. Police claim he had a long shoe horn that he was wielding.
The police then tasered him with a taser gun. Mr. Wrana still refused to go. Police then took out a shot gun and shot him multiple times in the abdomen with bean bag rounds. John Kass of the Chicago Tribune, who has done a great job covering this story, found out later that such tactics by the police had not been used in over 10 years.
The police claim Mr. Wrana had a butcher knife, but such a knife was never found, and the staff and other residents claim they never saw him with a knife.
It has been nearly 6 months since this happened, and the police are still “investigating” the incident. No explanations, no findings, no charges, no one held accountable.
I think they owe the family an explanation.
Review of police beanbag shooting taking too long
Excerpts:
It’s been about five months since police shot 95-year-old John Wrana down, with multiple shotgun beanbag rounds to the stomach, after they tased him in the nursing home.
But so far, no findings. No charges. And no one held accountable.
There hasn’t even been an official call to the family of the frail World War II vet who was shot in his Park Forest assisted living facility and died hours later, just weeks shy of his 96th birthday. Nothing.
“What bothers me is that there’s been nothing,” Wrana’s stepdaughter, Sharon Mangerson, told me late last week.
“Where’s the urgency to find out what happened to him?” she asked. “All these months and they can’t make a determination? If he were politically important, if he was a somebody, you think they’d find out sooner? But he was just a regular man, a Joe Schmo like all the rest of us.”
Illinois State Police officials are investigating the police shooting of Wrana, the old man I’ve been writing about since this happened in July.
See Also:
WW2 Hero Refuses Medical Care, So Police Kill Him in His Nursing Home
by Attorney Jonathan Emord
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