Video Captures Courtesy Sky Harbor International Airport

On the day she died, 45-year-old Carol Anne Gotbaum wrote these words in her journal: “Remember this day as a new beginning. With my heart beating, my hands shaking, my whole being destroyed by alcohol, God please give me the strength to fight this disease.”

It was Friday, September 28, 2007.

Gotbaum was on flight 407 from New York to Tucson – a last-minute change added a quick stopover in Phoenix. She was en route to the Cottonwood de Tucson rehabilitation center for a 30-day stay to confront the alcoholism that had plagued her for 18 months. She hoped to save her marriage and restore her family, which included three young children all under 9.

But everything fell apart when Carol got to Phoenix. According to the police investigation conducted after her death, she missed her connecting flight by one minute, got herself very drunk with booze and prescription medication, and became distraught when she was bumped from the next, overbooked flight. A Good Samaritan took pity on her and offered her his boarding pass, but the airline wouldn’t allow that. She became hysterical when told it would be a “security breach” to use the borrowed pass. She was “set off,” witnesses said. She abandoned her shoes, her purse, her jacket and frantically ran off through the gate area screaming, “I am not a terrorist!”

She was quickly confronted by Phoenix police officers who were facing an “irrational, hysterical” woman. Within eight minutes of her first outburst, she was arrested for disorderly conduct; police “took her down” in order to handcuff her behind her back, and they dragged her off to a tiny cell on the second floor of Terminal 4, where they shackled her to a cement bench. When she finally stopped screaming, they looked in on her from the small window in the door. By then it was too late.

Just 25 minutes after police were called, Carol Anne Gotbaum was dead. She had somehow maneuvered the handcuffs from behind her to the front and accidentally strangled herself in her frantic efforts to be free of her restraints.

Her anxious husband, calling from New York to check on her, wouldn’t know of his wife’s death for more than three hours, and when he was finally told, he screamed, “They killed her, they killed her!”

The blame game began immediately and turned into a media circus. One side asked how police could have so “brutally” treated a woman in obvious emotional and physical distress, for if police had been more compassionate, they say, this tragedy might have been prevented. The other side asked how any family could have sent an alcoholic off by herself on a cross-country flight, for if they hadn’t, none of this would have happened in the first place.

This is the inside story – with voices never before heard – of the death of Carol Anne Gotbaum.

An Instant Bond

Jodi Hall was exhausted after a wonderful week in New York with six girlfriends – best friends forever since at least sixth grade. These BFFs had celebrated many birthdays together since they graduated from Tempe’s McClintock High School, but this year was one of the biggies: They had started turning 40 and decided such a milestone needed to be celebrated in the Big Apple.

They’d had such a great time – saw two plays, visited the Statue of Liberty, shopped at Tiffany’s, and even though Jodi spent an entire day in bed when they first got there, that hardly dampened their fun. She’d had to rest up to get herself strong enough for the trip; the Lupus that had left her disabled for the past six years didn’t much care if this celebration was extra special, it took its toll anyway.

Now it was time to return home to Phoenix, and Jodi had boarded early so she wouldn’t be hurried. She had a window seat on a 150-passenger plane that left JFK Airport at 9:46 a.m., New York time. She was dozing on and off as the trip began, but she noticed that the slim, attractive woman who sat next to her seemed nervous and upset.

“I kind of felt like she was needing me,” Jodi remembers. But her need for sleep came first, and she was in and out for the first 40 minutes or so. She does remember looking over just after the plane took off and seeing the woman writing in a cloth-covered journal.

When Jodi finally woke up, she and Carol started conversing. Carol was upset, nervous, crying; Jodi was calm, reassuring, comforting. For the next five hours, they shared intimacies about their lives, telling each other stories and secrets that sometimes are easier to tell strangers. “She asked me a lot about my family and told me a lot about her family,” Jodi tells PHOENIX magazine in an exclusive interview. “She was going to Tucson to get help for her and her husband and her kids. She wanted to be the kind of mom she should be and used to be. She didn’t want to be the kind of mom she’d been.”

Carol admitted how hard her drinking problem had been on her marriage, but she stressed that her husband would be waiting for her after rehab, and it was important to her to make her family “proud” of her again.

Jodi remembers how Carol’s emotions seemed to bounce all over the place. One minute she was crying, the next she was laughing over a People magazine article about Brad Pitt – they both agreed how handsome he was – then she was crying and worrying out loud again. Jodi remembers Carol wondering if she’d done the right thing by leaving her children, then feeling reassured when Jodi stressed how brave she was to be doing this.

The anxiety so present in that row of airline seats also caught the attention of the passenger on the aisle, a missionary named Rosa. “Rosa spoke very little English and didn’t know what was going on; she just knew Carol was sad,” Jodi recalls.