Woman, 87, dies after Tasing

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.

“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,” he 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.

The two deputies, who were not identified, are on administrative leave.