The news broke yesterday that NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum’s daughter in law, Carol Ann Gotbaum, died in a Phoenix airport holding cell, where she was left alone in handcuffs.
According to what’s know at the moment, police believe she may have strangled herself.
How is it possible that this could happen? She was “disruptive” in an airport and ended up dead. Death is not the punishment for being disruptive. Death is not the outcome of being taken into custody. And why was she cuffed inside a cell anyway?
A lot of questions. Whether we ever understand how this happened (as opposed to getting a version that makes sense, but never truly answers anything) has yet to be seen. But this isn’t supposed to happen.
Being taken into custody should not mean that someone ends up dead.
According to what’s know at the moment, police believe she may have strangled herself.
How is it possible that this could happen? She was “disruptive” in an airport and ended up dead. Death is not the punishment for being disruptive. Death is not the outcome of being taken into custody. And why was she cuffed inside a cell anyway?
A lot of questions. Whether we ever understand how this happened (as opposed to getting a version that makes sense, but never truly answers anything) has yet to be seen. But this isn’t supposed to happen.
Being taken into custody should not mean that someone ends up dead.
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Of course, nobody deserves to die for being disruptive. But, had Ms.Gotbaum behaved herself, she would not have been arrested, and would probably be alive today. Instead, she apparently expected the departing aircraft to make up for HER lateness, and reverse course just for her. Indirectly, she was killed by her own arrogance.
And you know this how? You were there or simply can sense this from 1000’s of miles away when few of the details have even been released? When I read reactions like this, from people who automatically give the government the benefit of the doubt before any information has been received and assume that anyone who died in police custody was “indirectly … killed by her own arrogance” I realize that Conason is correct: It can happen here.”
I know I shouldn’t respond to trolls, but the right somehow believes simultaneously that (1) it’s treasonous to question the government and, (B) that it’s also perfectly fine to assume a young woman’s “arrogance” indirectly killed her? It’s really a sickening reaction that needs to be called out.
“At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
So the next time you hold up a line, those behind you should have license to kill you? Splendid.
Carol Ann Gotbaum
I am greatly alarmed by this woman’s death while in custody of the police.
There are many videos, audios, and written accounts of undeniable excessive violence against citizens by unrestrained police.
Have the local polices forces of this country been covertly nationalized? Why are the “black attack suits and combat boot” being worn by police in so many different districts of this country?
Not that many years ago, Black Americans were the victims of police brutality and heavy handedness. In a real sense they were treated as though they had no rights. As the elitist class becomes more powerful, have more of us “citizen” been demoted to the masses without rights?
When I hear people say “it could never happen here”, I agree that no leader with a funny mustache and brown shirted thugs are going to brutally control the masses. But, it IS already happening here. Ignoring the frightening reality that we citizen are now subjects of a police state will not make us secure or safe.
The only people who do not believe the change in police enforcement policies are the ones who have not yet had the guns of suppression pointed at them.
earl wayne corbett
Sadly, this is neither the first nor last time a person will be killed by a police choke hold. Sadly, this is neither the first nor last time police will cover up a murder they commit.
How do we begin to understand this? How did this happen? I have read some of the opinions posted here, I am happy to say, most feel as I do. How does a person late for a flight and upset, perhaps acting out, perhaps NOT, end up DEAD? A mother of three, a viable citizen of our City and our Country, very obviously manhandled, mistreated and left to die in a holding cell, with cuffs on, behind her back and shakled to a table. Are these now, acceptable policies, and are we going to blame the attack on our country on 9/11, as the excuse for this horrific, unnecessary death? At what point does common sense play a part in the day to day lives of our citizens, our policies and the treatment of We, the people? I, for one, do not care if she was screaming from the rooftops, are you telling me that at no point during this incident, there was not one person, who could have intervened on behalf of this woman, someone with common sense enough and the authority to change the course of what transpired? I am not buying that, not for one minute. I do hope with the luxury of 20/20 hindsight, someone involved in this matter has thought that perhaps there was something, anything that could have been done to ensure the safety of this woman, this citizen of our country. I am so sickened by this tragic event, so terrified that this is the beginning of a new regime, where common sense and decency has gone by the wayside, and all that is left, is brutal enforcement of a massacred new policy, originally designed to PROTECT our citizens. We MUST let the policy makers know this is totally unacceptable. This cannot happen again. This should never have happened. We should all mourn for this woman, and mourn the loss of our Liberties this situation so clearly represents. Diedre Flynn
your attitude is frightening
It is too late to bring back Democracy. The perfect coup…and Blackwater security is part of the state department. How long before Blackwater is hired to secure Americans?
I had a similar occurence happen to me in Atlanta. These events not only need to be looked into, but the American people have to wake up to the fact that the current security environment that creates a police force like this and uses it in this manner is not protecting us and is in fact making us the victims. An upset customer is not a security risk and the police actions that are being taken against us are harming the public, they are not protecting us. Wake up America, this is turning into a scene from Nazi Germany, it’s not the country I was born into.
Hello Ray:
I am so sorry you had to go through this, and I wondered if you reported this abusive treatment to your Congressman, or Senator? AND, if so, did you get satisfaction, or reassurance? This is an absolute horror and the more I hear about these types of situations becoming common place, the more disturbing it is. I am wondering just how many have died under similar circumstances? This is such an insidious situation, I just hope we don’t get up one morning and find we need our “Papers” to go out in public. You are absolutely right. Americans better wake up, before it’s too late. We have become so complacant, and we can no longer afford this luxury. I haven’t read another thing about Carol Gotbaum’s death since the day it happened. There is something very wrong with this picture.
fyi…in the latest CYA story by the Phoenix Police, they describe in detail how Carol Ann Gotbaum vomited in the mouth of the first responder, who bravely carried on despite the disgusting experience.
This is bullchit. Anyone who has been trained as a first responder, in the age of AIDS, TB and SARS, has been told repeatedly the dangers of attempting resuscitation without some kind of oral protective barrier.
I guarantee those guards would be using a mouth guard/face shield. Why has no one mentioned this, and blown apart that particular lie?
http://www.cpr-pro.com/products.html
I heard that this morning. Ah, the vomit sympathy vote. I wondered the same as you why no one bothered to challenge this flagrant attempt to lie their way through and use it to garner sympathy as being so kind and wonderful as to suffer the vomit of this dying woman.
The Gotbaums have been silent while they sit shiva. I am waiting for them to come forward and expect Betsy to speak out. Also, the autopsy should become available soon. Hopefully, we will start to hear what really happened to Carol Ann, aside from the vomiting image.
SHG: I am so glad to have stumbled across your lucid blog, which obviously does not intend to just roll over and play dead while the last vestiges of the first and fourth ammendment are incinerated. There have been a few things that have rattled me to my core in recent years, and for some reason this story is one of them. It is more than just that of a troubled woman who died a sad death…this seems to be a pivtal moment for our citizens – those who still remember and valued what it was to be a member of a free country with respect for the individual – to finally awaken from their post 9/11 stupor. It is time to realize that the stale old canard that ‘everything is different’ after that terrorist attack has been used to justify the removal of just about every freedom once guaranteed us by the US constitution. I suppose we’re supposed to accept that even the constitution itself is ‘different’ afer 9/11, merely a historical curiosity to be auctioned off to the highest bidder at Sotheby’s.
I grew up in the 1970s, when there were numrous hijackings by armed individuals, and yet all those incidents didn’t result in basic rights being abrogated and passengers being tasered, arrested and killed for the mere crime of travelling whilst being human. The far right and their jack-booted trolls who police the internet let a shred of intelligence or decency go unmaimed, all maintain that Carol Ann’s death ‘is her own fault’ because she ‘couldn’t control herself’, or ‘didn’t take responsibility for her own actions’. The blogosphere is filled with their moronic, mis-spelled hateful attacks of anyone who might be a drunk, over-emotional, troubled or just a demanding female. Seems New Yorkers in general are also a subject up for their free-floating hostility, so much for post 9/11 solidarity.
Hmm…well at last check Bush is a recovering alcoholic, his daughter has been arrestd for underage drunk driving, and their spiritual inspiration Rush Limbaugh is criminally addicted to oxycontin…the hypocrisy is breathtaking. It is about time americans of intelligence and decency took back their country from the brownshirts, the nazi-sympathizing skinheads, and all the “COPS” watching arm chair sadists who cheer them on. Please continue posting. Too many good people have been intimidated into silence by packs of trolls and Australopithecus brandishing the blunt object they call ‘english’…
Article on use of steroids by Phoenix police:
October 3, 2007 – 5:58AM
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/98747
“In July, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials said they were investigating about a dozen Phoenix police officers on suspicion of using anabolic steroids prescribed by Valley doctors who were illegally dispensing the drugs. Later, Mesa police admitted one of their officers was under investigation, and Chandler officials said three of their officers were named in the probe.
”