Did a taser kill him?

DEATH BY COP TASER

July 28, 2005 -- A violent drug suspect died yesterday after a cop shot him once with a Taser stun gun inside a Queens station house, police said.

Terrance Thomas, 35, of Rockville Centre, L.I., had been arrested for driving in a stolen car and for cocaine possession.

Thomas had been placed in a holding cell at the 105th Precinct station house while his alleged accomplice, Laquan Jones, 21, was being questioned.

At some point, he complained to cops that he wasn't feeling well.

By the time an EMS unit arrived, Thomas was sweating and trembling, police said.

For some reason, he became violent, preventing the medics and cops from getting him out of the cell, authorities said.

Police said they first tried a restraining net, then fired the single Taser charge to subdue him.

The shock temporarily incapacitated Thomas, they said, but he was conscious and alert in the ambulance.

But sometime en route to Queens General Hospital, he went into cardiac arrest and died.

The mother, of course, demands that Mayor Bloomberg get "answers." While tasers are pretty powerful, I suspect we already have the answer the mother doesn't want to hear: he was high on cocaine, which makes you paranoid and, to use the vernacular, really messes up your heart. ODB died from a cocaine and painkiller overdose, with the same symptoms before he collapsed: sweating, shaking and paranoia. The police don't know, or at least they didn't say, why Thomas suddenly became violent, but it could have been from cocaine-induced paranoia.

The suspect died on Tuesday; the initial autopsy results came back yesterday: inconclusive. Then again, ODB's autopsy was also inconclusive. It'll take a toxicology report.