Mentally Ill Alexandria Mom Tasered 4 Times While Cuffed, Shackled: Report

Natasha McKenna, the mentally ill Alexandria mom who died after being tasered Feb. 3 four times at the Fairfax County jail, was restrained with leg shackles and her hands cuffed behind her back while she was tasered, according to a report out today by The Washington Post.

The Post story is based on incident reports obtained by the newspaper. The reports show that McKenna, who reportedly weighed 130 pounds, faced six members of the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks during the Feb. 3 tasering incident.

According to the story, City of Alexandria police officials were contacted numerous times by Fairfax County to come and get their prisoner. McKenna was in jail because of a Jan. 20 warrant from Alexandria, for allegedly assaulting an Alexandria police officer on Jan. 15, according to an earlier statement by the Fairfax County Police Department.

After the Jan. 15 incident in Alexandria, McKenna was being held at Mount Vernon Hospital for mental health treatment, but for unknown reasons left the hospital, reportedly still wearing hospital garb, on Jan. 25, and called police from a grocery store on Telegraph Road saying she had been assaulted.

That’s when Fairfax County deputies responded, discovered the Alexandria warrant, and eventually took her to the Fairfax jail shortly after 1 a.m. on Jan. 26. Fairfax first contacted Alexandria about McKenna at 7:40 a.m. on Jan. 26, according to a statement by Fairfax County.

But McKenna sat in the jail for more than a week. It wasn’t until Feb. 3 that Fairfax officials decided to move the Alexandria prisoner themselves, since Alexandria officials had not come to pick her up, for unknown reasons.

She went untreated for her mental condition because Fairfax authorities said they did not have that authority since she was technically an Alexandria prisoner. If Alexandria officials had come to Fairfax to pick her up, she may have received more mental health treatment, according to the Post story. “But because McKenna was technically Alexandria’s prisoner, Fairfax could not petition a magistrate to have her placed in mental health care,” the Post reported.

After McKenna, 37, had sat in jail for days, Fairfax County Sheriff deputies made plans to move her, after they say the City of Alexandria was contacted by them three times to come and pick her up. They were attempting to bring her to Alexandria on Feb. 3 on the morning she was Tasered. Her heart stopped beating and she later died at Inova Fairfax Hospital.

Alexandria police spokeswoman Crystal Nosal told The Post she would not comment on the case while the investigation was pending and that Alexandria was “doing our own investigation on our practices on picking up inmates in other jurisdictions.”

No word on whether McKenna was supposed to be on medication; her mother has said she was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 12 years old.

Read the entire Washington Post story here.

PHOTO: Natasha McKenna, Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office