Death by Handcuffs
It was stories like this for which Simply Dumb was formed… that and the Darwin Awards. According to CNN, a woman in police custody in the Phoenix airport may have strangled herself while trying to wriggle out of her handcuffs.
I guess they don’t have security cameras or two-way glass installed in these holding rooms like they do on TV. Poor, poor woman.
Phoenix police were investigating Sunday how a 45-year-old woman died over the weekend while in police custody at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport.
Carol Ann Gotbaum may have accidentally strangled herself while trying to get out of her handcuffs, Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill said Saturday.
"According to investigators, it appeared as though Ms. Gotbaum had possibly tried to manipulate the handcuffs from behind her to the front, got tangled up in the process, and they ended up around her neck area," he said.
Witnesses told police that Gotbaum was "yelling and screaming" and running through the terminal Friday. She was arrested for disorderly conduct.
While handcuffed, the New Yorker became "disruptive" and she was taken to a holding room, where she was left alone, Hill told CNN affiliate KTVK.
Investigators said officers went to check on her five to 10 minutes later. Police policy requires that be done every 15 minutes.
Finding Gotbaum "unconscious and not breathing," Hill said, officers performed CPR.
"Sometime during the time she went into custody, she went into medical distress," he said.
Gotbaum was the mother of three young children and the daughter-in-law of longtime New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa County medical examiner said an autopsy would be conducted Monday morning.
source Tags: dumb news, darwin awards, handcuffs, phoenix airport, disorderly conduct
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8 opinions for Death by Handcuffs
thejynxed
Sep 30, 2007 at 8:02 pm
It’s physically impossible for someone to strangle themselves via standard handcuff restraints if her arms were restrained behind her back. To even get them in a position of trying to remove them, she would have to lean backwards on her rear and try to slip them forward under and around her legs, bringing them nowhere near her neck during the removal process. The most she would have suffered would have been a possibly broken wrist or dislocated thumb.
michelle Van fleet
Sep 30, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Same thing happen to me!!! At the NY Airport!!! No one would listen to me because i was from out of state (La)
michelle
Angel Elf
Oct 1, 2007 at 4:49 am
This sounds very fishy to me. How can anyone choke themselves while handcuffed? “She was very agitated and irate and angry”, They handcuffed her and took her to the holding room, where she kept screaming, authorities said. So some cop goes back to the cell to shut her up and she winds up dead. Accident my *ss.
al weinberg
Oct 1, 2007 at 5:49 am
I love how they use such vague yet descriptive terminology such as “disruptive”. I wonder if anyone will be charged with involuntary manslaughter?
Rob
Oct 1, 2007 at 6:21 am
This is bunk,
Option 1 - Handcuffed in front: why would you choke yourself trying to take them off, they’re already in front of you and basically, if you can choke yourself, that’s called “Suicide”. But wait, there’s more… It’s impossible to chose yourself to death, because you’ll pass out and go limp and then start to breathe again… Oh well, bye bye option 1
Option 2 - Here’s an anatomy lesson for you… Handcuffed behind your back: There’s 2 ways to get them around you, 1 - Under your bottom and around your legs or 2 - With double jointed or very flexible shoulder and elbow joints, you could possible slip these over your head… But wait, if I’m correct, the trachea (that wind pipe we breathe through) runs on the front of our body with the spine at the rear. If she was trying to get them over her head, then she may possibly get stuck on the back of her neck, putting pressure on her spine, no pressure on the trachea (ever seen on the movies when they try to strangle people by putting pressure on their spinous process?)…
Option 2 - ***BUZZER***
She either had a heart attack, stroked out, or someone stuffed a sock in her mouth (asphyxiation, if found in the autopsy, would be a possibility if that were the case… some one didn’t want to hear her and stuffed something in her mouth and she had a stuffy nose, it’s a mythbusters “plausable”)…
I smell a fish, though.
Hank Hill
Oct 1, 2007 at 6:23 am
Another stellar example of our fine men and women in uniform who can pull out the disorderly conduct card and throw it in the table anytime they please. If it were not for the disorderly conduct charge then she probably would have just been the crazy women running up and down the terminals at the airport and ending up on YouTube. But now she’s dead, can’t make people laugh when you’re dead.
BAD COPS NO DOUGHNUTS
Ban Disorderly Conduct, it’s all relative anyway. A COP who is having a bad day can make yours bad too…
Ken
Oct 1, 2007 at 7:37 am
No one would attempt to get handcuffs over thier head while handcuffed in the rear. They would go the opposite direction under the butt then put thier feet through them & up the front. I feel it was improper to have handcuffs on a prisoner in a holding cell to start with.
mara
Oct 1, 2007 at 8:02 am
Notice how she’s being portrayed on Drudge’s headline story, as unstable, not all there. Someone is really trying to twist the truth here. Definitely more to this sad story. I pray for her family.
Next thing you know people will be on the “no fly list” for complaining about the coffee.
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