Taser Maker Axon Has a Moving Backstory. It's Mostly a Myth
An Anonymous Coward writes:
This is a long, interesting investigative report from Reuters:
Taser maker Axon has a moving backstory. It's mostly a myth
Mostly more of "corporations behaving badly," but with a dastardly twist on why the company was formed.
Axon CEO Rick Smith claims his highly successful Taser company was inspired by the death of two school friends gunned down years ago. But much of the tale is false, Reuters found, part of a pattern of misrepresentations and self-serving behavior among top Axon executives.
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He started the company, he said, after "two of my high school friends were shot and killed." Projected behind him were photographs of the slain youths, marked with the dates of their short lives.
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Smith was not friends with the deceased, Todd Bogers and Cory Holmes, according to three immediate family members and a close friend of the young men. They were gunned down after a road rage incident in 1991, not 1990, as indicated on Smith's slide in Las Vegas. Smith played on the same football team as the boys at Chaparral in Scottsdale, Arizona - but not at the same time, according to school yearbooks seen by Reuters. The boys who were killed graduated in 1986. Smith does not appear in the yearbooks until the school year that ended in 1987.
Axon "ran a whole advertising campaign based on the murder of my son," Todd's father John Bogers said in an interview, recalling feelings of bereavement that the ads triggered. "They profited off that, and they didn't ask for permission."
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Shelby Bogers and Christopher Holmes, siblings of the football players Todd and Cory, said the story came as news to them: They did not learn about Smith's narrative until more than 15 years after their brothers' deaths, they said. Smith wasn't close with Todd or Cory, didn't attend their joint funeral and never offered a hand during the four-year search for the killer, Shelby Bogers said. Now Axon is "calling them his childhood friends," she said. "That word pisses me off."
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Smith's wife ...was employed by the company in the role of "CEO Support" and "Personal Assistant,"
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