NYC subway passenger dies after another puts him in a headlock

[SupersonicMax]

Is it unreasonable to expect someone to provide First Aid (Marines are trained) to someone that is unconscious? It’s not about the choke but what you do when you realize someone is in distress.

 

[Booter]

Is it unreasonable to expect someone to provide First Aid (Marines are trained) to someone that is unconscious? It’s not about the choke but what you do when you realize someone is in distress.

He placed them in the recovery position. That is the first aid for someone unconscious and breathing. It’s also the position you place someone in if they go unconscious from a choke- as long as they have an airway.

Not remembering to check the airway but remembering the 80% solution which is rolling them into the recovery position isn’t as damning as it seems to everyone else here.

Apparently in the video he can be seen moving in the recovery position and someone says “he ll be alright”. Doesn’t seem that the feeling at the moment was the same as what it is for us on the internet

 

[SupersonicMax]

He placed them in the recovery position. That is the first aid for someone unconscious and breathing. It’s also the position you place someone in if they go unconscious from a choke- as long as they have an airway.

Not remembering to check the airway but remembering the 80% solution which is rolling them into the recovery position isn’t as damning as it seems to everyone else here.

So, you just choked someone unconscious but don’t check airways?

That’s the point brihard is making. He received training in First Aid but can’t do the basics. If he can’t internalize training for First Aid, then we need to assume he can’t properly internalize other type of training (including MCMAP) to inform his actions.

 

[Booter]

So, you just choked someone unconscious but don’t check airways?

That’s the point brihard is making. He received training in First Aid but can’t do the basics. If he can’t internalize training for First Aid, then we need to assume he can’t properly internalize other type of training (including MCMAP) to inform his actions.

The second passenger checks his pulse. The guys defecates. You can hear another guy talking about his army training- saying you have to let go when they do that. It’s a very troubled event. I believe the second person eventually has a Kimura near the end.

You watch for chest falls and roll them into the recovery position. They come to generally in a few seconds. I don’t start mouth to mouth everytime I knock someone out.

I still don’t accept that brihard is doing use of force reviews and identifying a missed first aid step and can say none of their other training is valid,

That’s stupid. (None of you are stupid- and I don’t think your opinions are. That’s not what I’m saying)

I literally two weeks ago was involved in an incident where the post care of an unconscious person after an incident I had to walk everyone through the steps while they stared at the person. Guys who had done first aid a dozen times.

I didn’t suspect they didn’t know what they were doing. I suspected they were stressed. And this is just some dude on a subway,

I’ll leave you guys to your thread. I’ll come back when I see new news on it. To see your takes

 

[Booter]

I need a cause of death- pressure on the neck isn’t enough. I need to know about the injuries specifically to understand better what’s going on.

The “chokehold” on the video is mechanically incorrect. Like complete garbage. Long flat bone of the forearm is across the windpipe. No pressure on the carotid sinus at all.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I need a cause of death- pressure on the neck isn’t enough. I need to know about the injuries specifically to understand better what’s going on.

The “chokehold” on the video is mechanically incorrect. Like complete garbage. Long flat bone of the forearm is across the windpipe. No pressure on the carotid sinus at all.

Crushed windpipe maybe? Pretty hard to recover from...

 

[mariomike]

Crushed windpipe maybe? Pretty hard to recover from...

"Must've cracked his windpipe. That's it for him." - Paulie Walnuts

"What are you, a fuking doctor now?" - Christopher Moltisanti

View this content on Instagram

View this content on Instagram

When it comes to EDPs, just have to do your best. Not going to second guess a marine for stepping up. Leave that for the Manhattan Grand Jury. And the inevitable civil trial.$

https://twitter.com/x/status/963136652368666624

 

[mariomike]

Another magical day in NYC.

 

[Jarnhamar]

I had to walk everyone through the steps while they stared at the person. Guys who had done first aid a dozen times.

I've seen this a few times. Disconnect between someone's training and actually doing it for real. Environment might be a factor too? Seen a nurse (she said she was a trauma nurse in an ER) act like an idiot at the scene of a car accident. Everyone was fine but she was in a panic trying to take people's pulse and speaking gibberish.

 

[brihard]

We’ll have to disagree i guess.
When I did MCMAP in cherrypoint almost twenty years ago there was almost no “post care” or monitoring vitals. Wasn’t what the training was about. There was however a context where you don’t give the position up and maintain it by pressure on and pressure off. I did it as a candidate and didn’t teach it- so I’m not sure if it’s local flavour or baked in the curriculum,

I’ve also choked people out who seized up in a position of rigidity that felt like resistance, hence why a ref has to be involved.

What is “reasonable” shifts according to the persons background and training. You’re speaking as if you’re discussing a cop. You aren’t.

We ll just have to see how it plays out. Then we can have a gander at what comes out. You guys are basing this off some deeper understanding of use of force that I’m not recent on perhaps. I haven’t done an SME report in ten years. We didn’t use someone’s proficiency in first aid as a barometer for anything.

We used post care to show their headspace or mindstate. But not as a way to discredit some technique. That could be the flavour today.

I definitely was not super clear in how far my opinion does and doesn’t go here, sorry. I’ll elucidate on the significance (if any) of him not doing much effective first aid- in my opinion only. I do not have close to the expertise you do and I won’t profess to; I’m just giving an opinion on what we do know and can see. I would never go to this extent about a situation in Canada, for obvious reasons.

We’re all well into speculation and hypothetical here regarding potential defenses/mitigation to a criminal charge that’s likely coming quite soon. It’s understood that the suspect was a marine. It’s known that, generally, marines do MCMAP and that consequently he may have some formal training in administering a chokehold. There is a possibility that, if charged, he may advance a defense of perceiving a threat and falling back on training. Obviously from there his training records would be looked at.

Distinct from choking out and killing the guy, there was also the placing of the victim in the recovery position, although that sounds to have been done more by someone else. This suggests at least a super rudimentary attempt at first aid- but no more than that.

The suspect, as a marine, would have received first aid training. I don’t personally know that that means assessing vitals in a non-responsive victim and initiating CPR, but I’m comfortable saying it likely does; I can’t imagine they don’t learn CPR. But, no CPR was administered.

The logic that flows from this for me me is that it will be difficult for the suspect to fall back on a (hypothetical) defense of training to react to a perceived threat. Any claim to have acted on training in his use of force is undermined by an immediate failure to then follow training he (likely) received in first aid and resuscitation. To me, at least, not carefully assessing airway and breathing is mind blowing when a dude’s just been choked for ten or fifteen minutes.

I’m not holding him to a police standard on this. It may be his use of force is looked at purely as a civilian bystander and that nobody tries to introduce his USMC training into it. I think prosecution is likely to ask why he didn’t do first aid and attempt resuscitation given prior training. The most plausible answer to that would probably simply be that he was all jacked up from a stressful and scary situation. But it’s still part of the acts/omissions that will be getting looked at.

By far the biggest hill to struggle up will be showing that his use of force as a bystander was lawful. Everything after that is detail and nuance.

I need a cause of death- pressure on the neck isn’t enough. I need to know about the injuries specifically to understand better what’s going on.

The “chokehold” on the video is mechanically incorrect. Like complete garbage. Long flat bone of the forearm is across the windpipe. No pressure on the carotid sinus at all.

Yeah, more autopsy detail would be useful for us. The medical examiner ruled cause of death as “compression on the neck (chokehold)”. That said, the precise anatomical ‘why’ of the death may not matter if he fails to satisfy why he put the chokehold on at all. If a ‘lawful-but-it-went-wrong’ scenario, then yeah, it would matter quite a bit more.

 

[Booter]

Have you seen how long it was for fire/EMS to arrive? I haven’t. They roll the guy, the second bystander checks his pulse- he looks to me to have spasm and rigidity- and the video cuts.

I was trying to figure out if they left him there for one minute thinking he was going to recover- which would be more reasonable than no one checking his vitals for 5 minutes let’s say.

Thanks for that post brihard. I did find out he was a rifleman from 2017-2021 so lots of his training would have been “recent-ish” including the first aid and his MCMAP is baked into his trades training I can’t recall which belt but they all do the entry level and rifleman do more- but as I said before the technique was done incorrectly.

 

[brihard]

Have you seen how long it was for fire/EMS to arrive? I haven’t. They roll the guy, the second bystander checks his pulse- he looks to me to have spasm and rigidity- and the video cuts.

I was trying to figure out if they left him there for one minute thinking he was going to recover- which would be more reasonable than no one checking his vitals for 5 minutes let’s say.

Thanks for that post brihard. I did find out he was a rifleman from 2017-2021 so lots of his training would have been “recent-ish” including the first aid and his MCMAP is baked into his trades training I can’t recall which belt but they all do the entry level and rifleman do more- but as I said before the technique was done incorrectly.

Fair point- after the camera cut there may have have been an attempt at resuscitation before emergency services arrived. I haven’t read that there was, but I can’t exclude it.

 

[mariomike]

I suspect they shut that down ASAP.
Pity

The TTC makes mistakes. I suppose NYC does too.

There's 600 volts in the third rail.

There have been cases where the power has been turned back on while our crews were pulling bodies out from under trains.

Other times when the power was off, the technician tested the train horn while our crews were working underneath.

Like to signal the train is about to move, with you still working under it. You don't know they are just testing the horn.

Before crawling under, you can see the blue platform lights are off. But, you can never be certain the power not be restored by people you can not see.

It's all about keeping service delays to a minimum.

 

[TacticalTea]

Just came across this graph. Thought it somewhat topical:

 

[KevinB]

The TTC makes mistakes. I suppose NYC does too.

There's 600 volts in the third rail.

There have been cases where the power has been turned back on while our crews were pulling bodies out from under trains.

Other times when the power was off, the technician tested the train horn while our crews were working underneath.

Like to signal the train is about to move, with you still working under it. You don't know they are just testing the horn.

Before crawling under, you can see the blue platform lights are off. But, you can never be certain the power not be restored by people you can not see.

It's all about keeping service delays to a minimum.

Any confined space work should have lock outs - that the worker installs, and no one removes a lock out unless it’s the person who emplaced it.

 

[CountDC]

Waiting to see what the real facts are if they ever come out. Have seen timings of 15 minutes from one person but another witness on the train supposedly said it was more like a minute, Like everyone else haven't seen a full video so it will depend a lot on witness accounts.

For administering first aid - I was in the situation of a person clobbered by a vehicle travelling 80+kph. My action was to place him in recovery, call 911, watch him for any changes and wait for the ambulance.

With that I can understand that checking and performing CPR may not have been high on the mind at the time. Do we really think that a once a year basic first aid course is going to turn everyone into medics when something happens? How often would he have had first aid and how much would he retain after 2 years (he was released in 2021)? Watching the new clip it seems to me that first aid didn't occur to him until someone else started. Looks like it was an "oh yeah, we should put him in position, should have thought of that" moment. I honestly believe that for a marine or any other combat arm the combat training takes priority, is practiced more and sticks better than any first aid.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

How much time passed from application to release? Lots of different numbers. I would think it happened between stops. Guy gets on, starts ranting, gets taken down and eventually released. I don't thinks there were any stops during the altercation. I suppose it would depend on what route, but do subways typically run 15 minutes between stops? Were there any stops the subway made during the altercation? If we knew what line and stations, you might be able to figure how long it went on.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The notion that a person ought to remember all training equally should be ridiculous to anyone who underwent some kind of training and picked up some lessons well and some not so well.

 

[OldSolduer]

The notion that a person ought to remember all training equally should be ridiculous to anyone who underwent some kind of training and picked up some lessons well and some not so well.

And I agree. Despite taking ASIST and refreshers every two years many of our staff don't remember the basic steps of suicide intervention. Nor are they aware of policy regarding suicide prevention.

 

[brihard]

The notion that a person ought to remember all training equally should be ridiculous to anyone who underwent some kind of training and picked up some lessons well and some not so well.

I agree, that’s a ridiculous notion, but nobody is talking about “remembering all training equally”.

What I’ve been talking about is bog-standard Airway-breathing-circulation and then into CPR.

It’s also absolutely possible for someone to blank out and forget that, especially under stress. The point I’ve been making is simply that, if a defense of combative straining is entered, it would be undermined (not disproven) if there was, subsequently and immediately, a total failure on another trained physical skills that forms the absolute basics of first aid.

I would not expect someone who’s just been in a fight to remember how to, say, maintain an engine, or diagnose a pneumothorax, or boresight a rifle. I do have junk that checking a casualty for breathing and a pulse, and starting CPR, is a bit more of a ‘gross’ skill that might be more readily remembered under stress.

But, again, everything I’ve said on this is specific to the context of if a “fell back on training” defense gets entered, and would simply be something that could weaken but not disprove such a defense. It’s important that anything I’ve said on this isn’t ‘read into’ beyond what I’ve said, and clarified, I’m actually talking about.