Fried fish
Add another one to the list. The list, that is, of amped-up, angry jocks who have had ugly confrontations with cops and managed to escape Tasering incidents without having their hearts blow out of their chests.
This past week’s contestant was Scott Olsen, the stone-headed starting pitcher for the Florida Marlins. Olsen was lucky he didn’t get shot — as in shot with an actual pistol. Clocked at 48 in a 35 mph zone, Olsen refused to pull over for patrol cops, and instead drove all the way to his house, ignoring lights, sirens — even running a stop sign on the way home.
Once he got to his abode, Olsen got out of his car and ignored police orders to show his hands, keeping them behind his back. He then ignored commands to stop and get on the ground, and started walking toward the arresting cops. Eventually he walked past them and sat in a plastic chair near the front of his house. Note to Olsen: if you were Haitian and lived in the Bronx, they’d have already emptied four clips into your stupid ass.
When cops tried to arrest him, Olsen — who apparently is a total dickhead — reportedly resisted and started kicking at the police. The cops finally had enough and Tasered the drunken 6-5 hurler. When he was brought in, the pitcher was rung up on charges of driving under the influence, resisting an officer with violence, and fleeing and eluding a police officer.
Olsen has a history of getting into fights and appearing in the news the next day with black eyes or big knots on his head. Last year he got into a fight with reliever Randy Messenger and then later ended up getting heated with toad-like teammate Miggy Cabrera and deposed manager Joe Girardi, the latter of whom grabbed Olsen by the jersey during their “talk.”
Oh, and this year? After pulling a Vernon Maxwell and flipping off a fan in June, Olsen got into it with fellow Marlins pitcher Sergio Mitre during a game on July 15, resulting in a two-game suspension by his own team. He allegedly was abusing the clubhouse manager when Mitre reprimanded him for being a boorish jackass.
These days, almost every time you read about a famous athlete getting Tasered, it turns out that some other, decidedly less-celebrated sucker in some other part of the country has been killed by a Taser that very week. This time, there were two to accompany Olsen.
First, 27-year-old Carlos Rodriguez was killed after a pair of sheriff’s deputies in Norcross, Georgia, subdued him in an arrest. (It was the third time that someone had died by Taser in that county since 2003.)
Further west, in a much weirder case, police in Phoenix Tasered one 49-year-old Ronald Marquez after he was caught performing an amateur exorcism on his three-year-old granddaughter. Police burst into Marquez’s home and caught him holding the girl in a headlock while her mother was standing nearby, naked, covered in blood, and carrying a “religious icon.” Police naturally and logically ended up Tasering Marquez, though sometime after handcuffing him they were puzzled to discover that he was not breathing. Marquez later died in the hospital.
