Hill said it appears Gotbaum may have tried to get out of her handcuffs, became tangled in the process and the cuffs ended up around her neck. A cause of death will be determined by the Maricopa County Medical Examiner.

I’ve been trying to figure out how one manages to get cuffs around one’s neck while attempting to move them from the back position to the front one and strangle oneself … even with the zip-tie kind rather than the standard metal variety. It seems somewhat improbable, if not flat out impossible. I even got up, put a loop of elastic around my wrists and tried. The only way I know of to get handcuffs of any sort from the back to the front is to step through them, which requires a measure of flexibility and that one be proportionally weighted or even on the small and tiny side of the height/weight scale. This method doesn’t involve the neck at all, and knowing a bit about the human body and the limits of the joints, muscles and bone, I can’t fathom any other way to do it that does involve the neck.

I tried to find more on this story, but there isn’t much yet. I thought I had found more information when I read this blurb in my search results at Google News:

Carol Ann Gotbaum, 45, left alone screaming in a holding room, possibly tried to manipulate handcuffs from behind her to the front and got them entangled …

But as often happens, clicking through to the link resulted in finding a rewritten story. Yes, the news on the internet changes at the blink of an eye and on a whim. Stuff that is there one minute isn’t there the next.

Aside from the oddness about how exactly this woman died while in police custody, there is a moral to the story: don’t act like a crazy, screaming person in public places, or you will get arrested. Maybe don’t try to get out of your handcuffs too, unless you actually know how, though that part of the story just strikes me as terribly odd. I can’t imagine how she managed it.