In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
Politically-connected white woman dies in police custody. Apparently she managed to strangle herself with her handcuffs, according to the police report. How a woman can strangle herself with her handcuffs is a question that mystifies even the experts.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
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it is a mystery - for sure....
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of ways you could kill yourself if you had to. Biting off your own tongue and swallowing it is a fave of mine.
ReplyDeleteBut obviously her killing herself is far from the most parsimonious answer . . .
Unless they were planning to transport her relatively quickly, why would she be in cuffs in a holding cell? The arresting officer wants his/her cuffs back and the cuffs can be used as a weapon if they are fastened in the front.
ReplyDeleteIf they were fastened in the back, you get them to the front by moving the cuffs down around your butt. You can't get them over your head unless you dislocate your shoulders and elbows.
The whole thing is going to require a thorough investigation because the information that has been released is a bunch of nonsense.
From what I've gathered, the lady was pretty much off her head, ranting and raving and shouting and kicking. Supposedly she was cuffed in front of her with a shackle connecting the chain between the cuffs to an eyebolt on the bench she was sitting on. Which makes it even more curious. If her hands were basically cuffed to the bench, how could she get down low enough to strangle herself with the chain? And, uhm, I don't know about them fancy Phoenix cops (who BTW are notoriously trigger-happy -- Phoenix cops have killed more people per capita over the past two decades than any other big city PD in the nation), but when I was trained in how to deal with crazy people, we didn't need to shackle them to a bench when we put them in holding err timeout. We just shoved'em in there and let them holler and yell and kick at the walls all they wanted to, and didn't respond until after they calmed down and quit their ruckus. Anything else just encourages them to make a ruckus.
ReplyDeleteLike you said, there's a lot here that doesn't make any sense. I don't have the foggiest notion what happened, but the official story smells like a dead whale that's been on the beach for a week.
Oops, the shackle story apparently is
ReplyDeleteno longer operative, now her hands are back behind her back again and she somehow contorted herself to strangle herself on the cuffs. Man, this is as puzzling as remembering whether we are at war with Eurasia or Eastasia today, or that the chocolate ration has been increased to 12 grams this month.
And now she's shackled to a table behind her back. I give up. The stench is just getting too bad for me.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's a bench again. AGH! No wonder the family is wondering WTF happened. Even the question of what this woman was shackled to apparently can't be answered by the cops.
ReplyDelete