Getting tasered creates the sensation of having your brain shaken “like a peanut in a jar” and with “bees crawling through your skin.”
Mavs surfers know all about Shawn Rhodes, a Titan of the joint who was there in 1994 when legendary big-waver Mark Foo rode his last wave.
(“I never had any doubts the place would eventually take someone’s life,” Rhodes told the NY Times. “I’ll keep surfing it, though. Am I scared? Yeah. Every time I go out there, it’s always on my mind.)
Rhodes owns the Nor Cal Surf Shop in Pacifica and over the course of fifteen years he competed in eight versions of the epic Quicksilver “Men Who Ride Mountains” event.
So, yeah, he has cache around Santa Cruz.
Now, Rhodes, who is fifty-five, is suing the California Department of Parks and Recreation for, he says, its rangers using excessive force and violating his civil rights over an incident in 2020.
Rhodes says two park rangers, Jamie Stamps and Cameron Weaver,“tackled” him to the ground, used “jiujitsu holds” and tasered him “multiple times”, all over his off-leash dog Yoda at Four Mile Beach in Wilder Ranch State Park there.
In Rhodes’ complaint, filed on January 23, he says he was approached by the rangers after a surf and asked why his dog wasn’t leashed. He told ‘em he’d throw the leash from his board on his animal when he got to the top of a hill and could put down his board whereupon he says he was tackled and tasered in the guts.
Rhodes says he tried to pull the Taser’s prong out, “but he quickly fell to the ground due to the electrical charge the Taser sent through his body.”.
Getting tasered has been described as like having your brain shaken “like a peanut in a jar” and with “bees crawling through your skin.”
A little later, while he was getting cuffed, Rhodes says his arm was hyper-extended behind his back.
He was then put in the back of the ranger’s car, ironically without a seatbelt, causing him to “fly across the vehicle’s back seat” as
(The charge of resisting arrest was dismissed last August.)
Surf-wise, it ain’t been easy for Rhodes following the incident.
She shredded my shoulder,” Rhodes told McClatchy News, adding doctors told him the joint is 65 percent torn. “That’s been a painful situation for surfing… I can’t jump up fast, which means I can’t do what I’ve spent my whole life doing… It’s a horrible vibe…It’s stripped my ability to do what I love doing.”
Rhodes is seeking damages for lost wages and medical costs but also to maybe get anyone with a badge to tone down the physicality of their interactions with the public, particularly over something minor like a dog without its leash, although it ain’t the first time.
In 2014, a man was awarded $50,000 after he was tasered when he was caught jogging alongside his unleashed hound.
“I feel like I have to do something and stand up for people’s rights at some point,” says Rhodes.
