Colorado Springs police officers tased suspect and threatened to kill him during 2025 arrest, federal judge found

On the morning of June 17, 2025, Colorado Springs police responded to a theft call from a plumbing store on Mallard Drive. Officer Ryan Paine located Anthony Miranda and a companion about a mile away and moved to detain them; when officers tried to handcuff Miranda, he ran, and Paine and other officers, including Daniel Mork and an officer identified only as "Officer Kirby," chased him down. During the chase and arrest, officers tased Miranda at least five times. Once Miranda was on the ground, Officer Kirby pressed the barrel of his service weapon to Miranda's head and threatened to kill him. None of the officers advised Miranda of his right to remain silent during this part of the encounter.

More than a year later, in an August 24, 2026 order, U.S. District Senior Judge William J. Martínez ruled on Miranda's motion to suppress the evidence and statements from his arrest. Martínez divided the encounter into stages and found that while Paine had reasonable suspicion to detain Miranda and probable cause to arrest him, the chase-and-arrest stage was coercive: "the officers here had already tased Miranda at least 5 times, and most notably, Officer Kirby threatened to kill Miranda while pressing the barrel of his service weapon to Miranda's head," Martínez wrote, adding that "any semblance of a noncoercive or nonthreatening character to the encounter with law enforcement had long since vanished." He suppressed the statements Miranda made during that stage as involuntary.

The ruling was a split one: Martínez found Miranda's statements before his detention, and his later statements after Officer Mork read him his Miranda rights at the patrol car, were voluntary and admissible, treating the Miranda warning as an intervening event that purged the earlier coercion. Miranda was separately indicted by a federal grand jury on a felon-in-possession firearm charge after officers recovered a handgun during the arrest. No public reporting reviewed for this entry indicates that Colorado Springs police opened a disciplinary or internal-affairs review of the tasing or the death threat.