Tasered dad speaks to KTRK

KTRK has an exclusive interview with William Lewis, the man who was Tasered by an off-duty HPD officer as he tried to leave The Woman's Hospital of Texas with his newborn daughter early in the morning of April 12 — and Lewis really doesn't say much.

To recap, hospital staff called security when Lewis decided to leave with his 2-day-old daughter Carla at about 1:30 a.m. Neither the baby nor her mother, Jacqueline Gray — who was still recovering from a C-section in her hospital bed at the time — had been discharged, and hospital employees said no one had talked to them about plans to take Carla home. Off-duty cop D.M. Boling, who was working security at the hospital, responded to the call and said Lewis made "threatening remarks about this being a hostage situation" if he wasn't allowed to leave; Boling then decided to shock Lewis with a Taser, causing him to drop Carla on the floor. Carla was examined and found to have been unharmed by the incident, but Gray — who is now considering a lawsuit against the hospital and police department — claims the baby hasn't been the same since the incident.

Lewis agreed with that: "It shakes a lot. It's like a real uncomfortable baby," he said of Carla. Lewis told Channel 13 that the version of the story from the hospital staff and Boling — that he continued trying to leave the building after being told to stop — wasn't accurate because Carla was wearing a security device that set off an alarm, locked the doors and stopped the elevators, meaning he couldn't possibly have left. A police union spokesman told KTRK that Boling did everything he should have, and hospital administrators said they followed policy, adding that they had no idea Lewis was Carla's father. Whitley said Lewis showed her his hospital ID band, which corresponded with Carla's, but given that, she didn't offer any insight into why staff members at the hospital wouldn't have recognized him.

Oddly enough, Whitley apparently didn't ask Lewis why he decided to leave the hospital in the middle of the night, without consulting anyone, before his daughter or Gray had been discharged and against the warnings of hospital staff — a combination of factors that would seemingly set off alarms in any responsible institution. We guess we'll have to wait for the answer to that one.