An attorney representing the family of a man murdered when police used their Tasers on him more than 50 times in 2019 is making an important call of federal investigators investigating police brutality, and that is not to overlook rural America. Former Oklahoma police officers Brandon Dingman and Joshua Taylor were convicted on Nov. 8 of murdering Jared Lakey, 28, in the second degree when they used their Tasers in a manner the court determined was both “dangerous and unnecessary,” according to The Washington Post. The officers targeted Lakey in Wilson, Oklahoma, a city about 100 miles south of Oklahoma City with a population of 1,399, according to U.S. Census results from 2020.

”These officers didn’t violate their policy or training, they tortured Jared precisely because that’s how Wilson, Oklahoma, decided to police the community,” Spencer Bryan, the Lakey family’s attorney, told The Washington Post. In calling for justice in rural America, he referenced the high-profile police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, whose deaths led to Department of Justice investigations of the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. “Southern Oklahoma isn’t a major metropolitan area, but the people here are just as important as those in Minneapolis or Louisville,” Bryan said in a statement the Post obtained. “The DOJ needs to take seriously its duty to protect all Americans and investigate what’s happening to rural America.”

Warning: This video contains police violence that may be triggering for some viewers.

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Taylor and Dingman were called to investigate Lakey on July 4 after a caller described him “acting in a disorderly way,” The New York Times reported. When officers arrived, they said Lakey, who was naked and unarmed, wouldn’t comply with their commands. So they shocked him with Tasers, and eventually a Carter County deputy sheriff took Lakey into custody. He stopped breathing, the State Bureau of Investigation told the Times. He was taken to a hospital in Healdton and later transferred to OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City, where he died on July 6 of multiple heart attacks.

Bryan has filed a civil rights lawsuit on the family’s behalf. The Wilson Police Department, which Bryan said did not immediately fire the officers, has not responded to The Washington Post's request for comment.

Shannon McMurray, a lawyer for Dingman, told The New York Times on Monday that her client planned to appeal his conviction. “It’s just a tragedy for everybody,” McMurray said. “In my opinion, they acted within policy.” She also claimed the officers were trying to avoid using other force on Lakey. “They were truly, truly concerned for his safety and theirs if they had gone hands-on,” McMurray said.

Attorney Warren Gotcher, who represented Taylor, also told the Times his client would file an appeal and that preexisting health issues were to blame for Lakey’s death. “We’re very disappointed in the verdict,” Gotcher said. “No one could look at him and tell that he had that much of a diseased heart.”

Craig Ladd, the district attorney, told The New York Times on Monday that officers were trained to limit Taser exposure to 15 seconds or less, but that Lakey was subjected to 3 minutes and 14 seconds of electrical connection from the Tasers. “They Tased Jared because he was lying naked in a ditch and wouldn’t put his hands behind his back when they asked him to, even though it wasn’t clear whether Jared truly understood what was going on or what he was being requested to do,” he said. “He never made any aggressive moves towards the officers, swung at them, lunged at them, or kicked at them.”

It’s not the first time a police officer has deemed a naked man so much of a threat that he was killed. Robert “Chip” Olsen was sentenced to 12 years in a Savannah prison after he shot and killed a Black Afghanistan War veteran in Georgia on March 9, 2015. Anthony Hill, a 26-year-old Air Force veteran, was naked at the time, a fact Olsen knew before arriving at the scene because it’s what prompted a witness to call 911, according to Atlanta Black Star. Olsen said when he arrived Hill started running toward him, which the cop of seven years with the DeKalb County Police Department interpreted as a threat.

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“I remember thinking when he started sprinting to me … I’m thinking, ‘This guy is big,’ ” Olsen said, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This guy looks like he’s muscular, like a football player. Kind of built. I noticed that when he was running I saw muscles pumping.”

As it turns out, Olsen’s jury didn’t consider the mere presence of a Black body in motion as much of a threat as the cop did. 

In the case of Lakey’s death, Kevin Coley, chief of the Wilson Police Department, initially placed Dingman and Taylor on administrative leave and the officers weren’t charged until July 2020, almost a year after Lakey was killed. Coley testified in court that the officers were hoping to trigger neuromuscular incapacitation, which would cause a victim’s muscles to stop working, according to Fox-affiliated KXII. But Lakey kept moving, and Coley interpreted that movement as actively resisting.

“To have a police chief tell the family in open court that torturing Jared was consistent with policy is just too barbaric for words,” Bryan told The Washington Post.

The police chief’s position is, however, telling, adding an emphasis to Bryan’s warning that although the Lakey family is “grateful to the jury and the District Attorney for the convictions,” the “risk to the public remains.”