Lawyers for the family of Carol Anne Gotbaum, who died in police custody during an airport layover in Phoenix, filed an $8 million wrongful death claim against that city today
Carole, the daughter-in-law of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, was inebriated when she allegedly went berserk at Sky Harbor International Airport Sept. 28 after she missed a connecting flight to Tucson.
She had been traveling alone from New York to Tucson, where she was to enter an addiction treatment clinic.
Cops had handcuffed her to a desk in an unattended cell, where she died of asphyxia. Police said she apparently strangled herself while twisting her handcuffed arms from around her back to her front.
The family alleges that police “used excessive and unreasonable force on Carol, as if she was a dangerous criminal, rather than as the sick, intoxicated, and vulnerable person she was,” according to their legal papers.
But a scathing response from the Phoenix law department ripped into Gotbaum’s husband, Noah, for letting his wife travel alone.
“The thrust of the Gotbaum family claim is that the city of Phoenix officers should have been more supportive than Carol’s own husband, more knowledgeable than her own family, and should somehow have known that she suffered from a private condition that she deliberately hid from the public.
The letter, written to family lawyer Michael Manning, continued”…The only ones who knew that Carol was depressed, suicidal, and alcohol abusive were members of her own family.