Carol Anne Gotbaum’s Airport Death – The Tragedy Continues to Confound
The last few days have brought more and more troubling details regarding Carol Anne Gotbaum’s tragic death at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Her husband, Noah Gotbaum’s eulogy, released to CNN, summarizes much of what went wrong:
“If the airline or the police authorities had treated Carol with some modicum of sensitivity and grace, or one single person at that airport had put an arm around her shoulder, sat her down and given her some protection, she might still be with us today,” Noah Gotbaum said at her funeral Sunday in New York.
This CNN report analyzes the timeline of unfolding events.
Yesterday, we learned more about how much police had erred, even after her death, in not revealing the truth to her husband when he contact them by phone. Audiotapes of those phone calls have now been released:
* Gotbaum: “My wife is at the airport, and she is in a very, very fragile mental state.”
* Operator: “Okay, hang on the phone one second, okay?”
The emergency dispatcher at Phoenix Airport called a lieutenant at the Phoenix Police Department.
* Operator: “Hey, I’ve got Noah Gotbaum, the subject’s husband, on the line.
* Lt. Gehlbach: “Okay?”
* Operator: “Okay, you gonna talk to him?”
* Lt. Gehlbach: “You know, I want somebody who’s professional to be talking to ‘em. Not just blow it to ‘em over the phone because I don’t know how he’ll react.”
Then the operator got back on the line with Noah Gotbaum.
* Gotbaum: “Can you tell me what’s happened? Do you have any idea?”
* Operator: “We don’t have any information.”
* Gotbaum: “You don’t have any information. You haven’t heard a thing?”
* Operator: “No.”
But that wasn’t true. In three phone conversations spanning 90 minutes, operators and police officials withheld the truth: That Carol Anne Gotbaum had been restrained by cops at an airport gate, put in a holding room and found dead.
Eventually, Noah Gotbaum got a family friend in Arizona and got him to rush to the airport to find out what was going on. It was that friend, sitting in a room with police, who informed him his wife was dead.
CBS 2 HD spoke by phone to the Gotbaum family’s attorney, Michael Manning.
“It is difficult for us to understand why somebody didn’t have the courage and decency to simply tell him we have some tragic news for you,” Manning said,
Some experts question their handling of the matter.
“Sometimes you see police departments that are not prepared to deal with these unusual circumstances and end up making blunders,” Professor Eugene O’Donnell said.
Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
Perhaps witness reports will eventually show that some such care was shown to Carol. But none have emerged thus far and, frankly, there’s every reason to assume the worst. For we all know what air travel is like today. For passengers, it’s one petty insult and indignity after the other.
And that’s when things go without incident.In the past, when faced with the frustrations of air travel, passengers had, if not the right, then some ability to fight back. If, say, you were seated on a trans-continental flight 10 rows away from your four-year-old, you could raise the issue, and if you were ignored (as you often were), you could kick up a fuss and pretty much embarrass someone into setting things right.
Now that’s all over. You voice a complaint and they threaten to call security. This is enraging for anyone, under any circumstances.
Imagine what it would do to you if you were already depressed, even suicidal. Imagine some bit of typically maddening airline officiousness happening to you on a day when you were already feeling embarrassed and ashamed. You were all alone – half a continent away from your husband and children, and the friends who were supposed to meet you hadn’t shown up. Imagine, under these circumstances, that you got to your gate one minute late. You learned that your seat had been given away. A man then offered you his seat on the next flight out, but the gate agents wouldn’t let you take it, because to do so, they said, would be a “security breach.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” Carol Gotbaum screamed. She was, she said, just “a pathetic, depressed mother.”
That is the tragedy. In the aftermath of 9/11, we need the safety measures to prevent future terrorist attacks, but at times like this, it becomes clear that such safety and security measures have gone too far and have become counterproductive, which is a profound understatement in the tragic case of Carol Anne Gotbaum’s airport death.
Andy Hill and the police have been lying. I’m not saying this to “rag” on the police. I’m saying this because the stories they tell keep changing. Look it up. Find every text by the police in chronological order and see how the story changes. First, they weren’t aware the husband had called. Then, they were aware, but he called after she was dead. It was 15 minutes, then 8. She was searched, then she wasn’t searched. They spent 15 minutes trying to calm her, then they show her handcuffed withing seconds. Just find the information printed by the police spokesman and see how that information keeps changing.