Oct 2, 2007 9:31 pm US/Eastern
Passenger Describes Gotbaum Incident In Phoenix
Woman: 'She Was Screaming, 'You're Hurting Me!''
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Carol Anne Gotbaum was found dead in a holding cell at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport on Sept. 28.
CBS
CBS 2 HD has learned more about the wild confrontation between a Manhattan woman and police inside an Arizona airport. Other passengers are now describing what they saw minutes before Carol Anne Gotbaum was found dead inside a holding cell.
CBS 2 HD spoke to one woman who was there, but did not want to be identified.
"She got her cell phone, broke it on a couple of customers and she threw it on the floor, hit them," the woman said.
Gotbaum, the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, was on her way to an alcohol rehabilitation clinic Friday when she missed her plane and started to scream. Police handcuffed her and put her in a holding room.
"She was screaming, 'You're hurting me! The handcuffs are too tight on me!'" the woman said.
The Phoenix medical examiner is attempting to learn whether she strangled herself with her handcuffs, as police say. Autopsy results have yet to be released, but critics of the police are already crying foul.
"One has to wonder whether there was not some over-reaction, some excessive force and entirely inappropriate response to the problem here," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks security was intensified at airports around the country. The question in this case is whether all that new security did more harm than good.
"They come there with weapons. They come there with an orientation towards force -- that's what police officers do," John Jay College Professor Eugene O'Donnell said. "And they should be reserved, absolutely reserved, for situations where they are needed and where there really is a genuine breach of the peace, not the kinds of scenes that are repeated all over the country every day in airports."
Phoenix police have insisted they were following procedure in the case. And reports of Gotbaum's alcoholism and even two suicide attempts suggest she's had an unstable past.
Until a cause of death is determined, the case will continue to remain a mystery.
Two autopsies were performed Tuesday, one by the local medical examiner and a second by an independent pathologist hired by a Gotbaum family attorney.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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