You have the right to remain lassoed, cowboy.
A deputy in Washington state tossed a lasso around a chainsaw-wielding maniac with the skill of a cowboy wrangling a stray cow, wild police body camera footage shows.
“A lasso is definitely something you don’t normally see on a regular basis,” Deputy Carly Cappetto, public information officer with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, told local outlets.
Deputies from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office received a call Saturday afternoon about a domestic incident involving a fight between an adult son and his parents.
They arrived to find the son chasing his father with a chainsaw, according to King 5.
The deputies intervened and managed to corral the suspect, a 32-year-old man in the throes of a mental health crisis, into a pond on the property, according to the outlet.
The suspect, still armed with a chainsaw, refused to leave.
“I can’t talk to you with a chainsaw,” one deputy says to the suspect in the video.
At one point, the deputies threatened to use a beanbag gun on the man, according to the footage.
After nearly an hour of negotiations, one officer – a member of the rural “mountain detachment” unit who often encounters large animals on the job – went to his car and grabbed his lasso.
The deputy warned the suspect one final time to get out of the water. When he didn’t, the deputy gracefully cast his lasso along the madman, the clip shows.
It landed perfectly around the suspect’s torso.
The suspect screams as he is dragged back onto land, while another deputy shouts: “I’ll get the chainsaw!”
Nobody was injured in the stand-off, and deputies took the suspect, whose name was not released by police, to a local hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
“Great job to these deputies that thought outside of the box on a method that wasn’t going to cause any harm or hurt anybody,” Cappetto told King 5. “He was safely able to get to the hospital and get the mental health services that he needed.”
The sheriff’s office said it is the first time a lasso – usually used on animals – had been deployed to apprehend a criminal suspect.
“The subject’s suffering a mental health crisis with a deadly weapon, that’s made threats and doesn’t want help. How do you combat that and take them safely into custody?” Cappetto asked theoretically.
“Well, a lasso clearly did it in this case.”
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