Last Nov. 1, Noah Gotbaum phoned his father and stepmother to say he had just discovered his wife, Carol, drunk and passed out in their Upper Manhattan townhouse. An ambulance, he told them, was rushing her to the hospital.
He asked them to come watch his three young children.
Carol Gotbaum spent one night at the hospital. Her stepmother-in-law, Betsy Gotbaum, saw her in the emergency room after she awoke. “I’m ashamed of myself,” Carol told her.
The night marked the first knowledge Betsy Gotbaum had of her stepdaughter-in-law’s struggles with alcoholism and depression, she said last week.
On Sept. 27, Carol Gotbaum agreed to fly to Arizona and spend a month at Cottonwood de Tucson, an addiction-treatment clinic. The decision set in motion a chain of events that left Carol Gotbaum dead at 45 and gave rise to questions about her treatment at the hands of the Arizona police.
On Sept. 28, Carol Gotbaum was denied access to a connecting flight in Phoenix because boarding had been completed by the time she arrived at the gate. Police say they believe she had been drinking, and she protested in a way they later characterized as “hysterical” and “irrational.” She was dragged to a holding cell at the airport, hands cuffed behind her back, was shackled to a bench, and was left alone, yelling.
A few minutes later, when she grew silent, officers looked in the cell and found Gotbaum unconscious with the chain stretched across her neck. Attempts to revive her were unsuccessful.
Through their lawyer, Michael Manning, the Gotbaums have contradicted the version of events described by Phoenix police and indicated that Gotbaum’s death could have been avoided if officers had responded differently. The police, meanwhile, have made public security tapes that show a clearly distraught woman running amok in a concourse and resisting efforts to subdue her.
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On Sept. 28, Gotbaum arrived in Phoenix at 12:18 p.m. She had about 45 minutes before her connecting flight, and according to police and the Gotbaums’ lawyer, she may have had something to eat and drink. According to the police report, Officer Terri Klepper, who eventually would search Gotbaum, told investigators that she “smelled strongly of intoxicating beverage on her breath.”
Gotbaum checked in at 1:05 for a 1:30 flight, according to the police report, but the plane was overbooked and her seat had been given up. She phoned her husband and returned to the ticket counter several times to complain.
Around 2:30 p.m., Gotbaum asked about using another passenger’s ticket to get on a 2:58 flight for which she had been given a standby reservation — a man had apparently offered to give her his seat — and when she was refused, she exploded.
“She kept on yelling: ‘I’m not a terrorist. I’m a sick mother. I need help,” said Omar Guerrero, who works at a sunglasses stand in the airport and saw the outburst. Gotbaum then took off down the concourse hallway.
Security officers and police approached and tried to calm her before taking her to the holding cell. The police report says she was in the room by herself for six to eight minutes before she was found unconscious. She was pronounced dead at 3:29 p.m.