To the Editor:

The recent Enterprise article on local police Taser use during a routine traffic stop was very interesting.

Last fall, I was watching the news and heard about an unarmed man who was tased four times and beaten to death by six police officers on the street in front of his home in Ballston Spa.

The police investigation of the six policemen responsible did not impress the grand jury and no indictments were made.  The man left dead on the street with his head bashed in and body broken was barely recognizable by his family.

His last words captured on a neighbor’s cell phone were, “You’re killing me!”

The victim was my good friend, Dan Satre.

For many years Dan’s company made promotional items for my business, including several hundred T-shirts we collaborated on.  More recently, Dan made the infamous “Sea Wolf” T-shirts for a buddy of mine from high school.

Dan’s girlfriend, Susan, was a charming Irish girl and beautiful as well.  Despite a generation gap, we all got along fine, fine enough, in fact, to spend a week together in France.  We went to Paris, my favorite city. 

There is a website that chronicles Taser deaths by police — truthnottasers.blogspot.com: No. 866 is Dan Satre.  The site deals only with Tasers and not other police-related deaths, such as the young black Baltimore man who took a fatal ride in a police van, the poor black man selling cigarettes on a New York City street gang-tackled by police and choked to death, or the young black girl in Texas arrested for not using her vehicle turn signal and found dead in her jail cell three days later.

So many people die at the hands of police in so many ways, “Getting to Prison” has become America’s ultimate reality TV show. 

Is it right that the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25 percent of the worlds’ prison population?  Or is it just a function of being the world’s richest nation that we can afford to do so.  We certainly can afford a lot of volunteer fire stations.

Quite often, I think of my friend, Dan Satre, as I look at my shelves of neatly stacked “Sea Wolf” T-shirts.  It’s just not right that the T-shirts have outlived the cheerful, young man who made them.

I’m sad we’ll never see Paris again.

Ed Cowley III

Altamont