2 Officers Charged With Stun-Gun Torture of Teen
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Two Huntington Park policemen were charged with felony brutality counts today by prosecutors who said they had tortured a teen-ager with an electric stun gun.
Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner described officers William Lustig, 31, and Robert Rodriguez, 35, as thugs.
Reiner said the officers used an unauthorized, 50,000-volt stun gun in front of other officers and a 16-year-old Explorer Scout to elicit a confession from a teen-age robbery suspect, identified only as “Jaime R.”
Pointing to color photographs showing a pair of dime-sized burns on the youth’s thigh, Reiner said the shock from the device is sufficient to make a man keel over.
In Huntington Park, about five miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Police Chief Geano Contessotto was on vacation and could not be reached for comment. Other police officials declined to comment.
Lustig and Rodriguez are charged with unnecessarily assaulting and beating a person under color of authority and inhumane treatment of a prisoner.
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