Autopsy says 87-year-old Ore. woman died of heart disease after officers used stun gun on her

87-year-old Ore. woman dies after hit by stun gun

BORING, Ore. — Phyllis Owens apparently didn’t know day from night when she died at 87, an hour after sheriff’s deputies closed in on her as she reached for a handgun, an officer said Friday.

“We had to respond,” said Detective Jim Strovink of the Clackamas County sheriff’s office.

An officer hiding in the shrubbery around her rural home jolted the frail woman with a stun gun Thursday afternoon, and she collapsed unconscious. She died soon after in the hospital. The autopsy report said her heart disease was the cause of death.

Two Clackamas sheriff’s deputies had gone to her wooded housing development near Boring after a man using a backhoe to replace her water line reported that she had threatened him with a handgun, Strovink said. It was about 2:30 p.m.

“She came out waving the gun and had him up against the backhoe,” Strovink said. “She yelled at him, ‘What are you doing here at this time of night?’”

The worker called for help, and deputies arrived to find the woman on her porch, Strovink said. Approaching her, they talked her into putting down the weapon, he said, but she quickly picked it up again.

The probes of the officer’s Taser hit her left arm and hip, said Dr. Larry Lewman of the state medical examiner’s office.

Owens had a history of heart disease and that was the cause of death, Lewman said Friday. He said he would do more research to determine what effect the electrical shock had on her pacemaker.

“A healthy person would not have died this way,” Lewman said.

Strovink said Owens had recently gotten out of the hospital and was reportedly suffering from dementia. He said it wasn’t clear how she came by the weapon.

Since her husband died some years ago, Strovink said, Owens had lived alone in Big Valley Woods, a community about 20 miles southeast of Portland that bills itself as a private development for manufactured housing. Journalists who visited Friday were ordered to leave.

The two deputies, who were not identified, are on administrative leave. That would be the practice if the death was considered the result of lethal force, although Strovink said it wasn’t.

“But we’re handling it as if we had actually shot her,” he said. That includes an investigation involving outside officers.

Strovink said that when the woman grabbed her handgun off the porch railing, officers would have been justified in using their firearms, but they didn’t.

“They did a commendable job in using a minimal amount of force,” he said.