New York Family of Officer Who Committed Suicide Sues City

John Eligon at the NY Times reports that the family of a police lieutenant who committed suicide last year is suing the city, claiming that police officials drove him to kill himself. The suit maintains that the officials vilified the officer, Lt. Michael W. Pigott, after a confrontation in Brooklyn in which the lieutenant’s order to shoot an emotionally disturbed man with a Taser gun led to the man’s death.

 

Susan Pigott, the wife of Lieutenant Pigott, who worked for the Emergency Services Unit, maintains in the lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn that her husband “suffered severe and excruciating humiliation, mental anguish, fear, depression and shame,” after department officials took away his gun and badge, assigned him to desk duty and told the news media that he had acted improperly when he ordered an officer to fire a Taser at Iman Morales. 

In September 2008, Mr. Morales, naked, ranting and swinging an eight-foot-long fluorescent light bulb at officers, tumbled to his death from a roughly 10-foot-high ledge atop a storefront security gate outside his building at 489 Tompkins Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, after Officer Nicholas Marchesona, on orders from Lieutenant Pigott, fired a Taser that immobilized him. Mr. Morales hit the pavement and suffered a fatal head injury. More HERE