4732

But if you decide to exercise the option of restraining them, I’d say it’s your responsibility to do so non-lethally.

4733

In that situation, I’d kind of hope that the police would respond in less than 15 minutes, and once you are restraining the guy, I’m not sure what you are supposed to do in the absence of any authorities showing up.

I guess I have to admit that I’m also not seeing the victim here as some innocent guy, either. Seems like in the best case scenario, he was bullying random incident people on a train. While tragic, the dude fucked around and found out.

We can lament the fact that perhaps society failed him, leading to him being homeless, on the subway, yelling at random passengers, but it’s also not all on that guy restraining him. A lot of stuff went wrong before that guy got involved.

4734

First, assume a spherical hobo…

4735

I mean, maybe I’m wrong in my assumptions as well, but in my experience, this sort of thing has almost always been mental illness, and the best course of action is just ignoring the person. Failing that, I would’ve moved to the next car, or gotten off at the next stop.

If you can’t restrain someone without killing them, then yeah, you should wait until it moves beyond shouting to do so.

4736

I agree with all that, but until I see what happened prior to the guy being restrained, I dunno what happened.

4737

Ya, here in Oregon a few years back a crazy guy was yelling at a few women who had hijabs on and a couple of bystanders stepped in to help diffuse the situation (just told the guy to back off and leave them alone, no physical touching) and the crazy guy pulls out a knife and slashes the throats of two of them. The 3rd guy got some heavy slashes.

The first two died.

Before that occurred, I would have thought to intervene. Maybe that guy who put a headlock on him knew about the attack (or similar in other states) and didn’t want to take any chances. The guy struggles and the guy is holding on for dear life. What’s going to happen if you let go?

Call the cops and they shoot the crazy guy.

There is no great solution here except to reverse the decision congress made back in the 70’s and 80’s and keep the crazy people locked up.

4738

For those of you that think there’s a sequence of words that makes it okay to sneak up behind the speaker and choke them to death, does the sequence only work for homeless people? Can you kill a guy in suit for saying them? How about a child?

4740

Yea what if a 10 year old threatens to teabag me, can I crush his windpipe?

4741

I don’t think there’s any sequence of words that let you intentionally kill someone, but that’s not what happened here, right? It seems that by all accounts, they were just trying to restrain the guy.

So then the question becomes, "is there anything that someone might say which might cause you to restrain them? Yeah, probably. If they indicated they were going to harm themselves or others, then restraining then might be the right call.

And yes, you would do the same thing to a guy in a suit or a child. In the case of the child, they would likely be much easier to restrain.

Without knowing more about what the guy was doing before he was restrained, is hard to know whether it was reasonable or not, but I feel like you are presenting a false narrative of this guy just minding his own business when some guy jumped him and strangled him, but that doesn’t sound like it’s what happened.

4742

You can restrain someone without strangling them.

4743

I don’t think it is particularly believable that the guy doing the restraining didn’t know that chokeholds kill people. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to believe that the victim went from ‘needing to be restrained’ to ‘dead’ in an instant after being choked for 15 minutes. At some point he would have stopped struggling, if only because he was unconscious.

4744

What was he shouting? Was he demanding food?

4745

I think that according to witness reports, they didn’t keep holding him after he lost consciousness, but I don’t know if they did or for how long.

4746

I’m not sure that’s possible. I guess we will never know.

4747

Eh, but the guy wasn’t actually strangling him.

I mean, if you actually or someone in a choke hold, with the intention of actually cutting off their air supply, they are going to lose consciousness very quickly.

From the videos, and witness reports, they were restraining this guy for a while before he lost consciousness.

That’s what suggests to me that the guy was just trying to hold him, rather than actually choke him out, but maybe I’m mistaken.

4748

I really feel like we have a word for when you sneak up behind someone and assault them and they die because of the assault. And like we have a phrase that describes the kind of force you’re using when you decide to put someone in a chokehold.

4749

I mean, he restrained him. By holding him, until he choked. To death.

There’s a reason why chokeholds are banned by many law enforcement agencies.

4750

What phrase is that?

EDIT: Oh, I gotcha, you are saying that it’s deadly force.

I think many police departments do consider actual carotid pressure techniques, to be this, where you are intentionally trying to knock the person out.

To be clear, because maybe I just missed something… Is that what happened here?

Did he actually put him into a hold, knock him unconscious by blocking blood flow to his brain, and then just hold him like that for 15 minutes?

If that’s what happened, then that’s obviously indefensible, but that isn’t what I thought happened. I thought he was just holding him in a headlock.

4751

Most times a “professional” choke hold, as you would see in MMA that can knock you out in seconds, is not about cutting off the AIR supply. The trachea is pretty rigid and if you cut of the air that way you are likely to crush and break something, maybe even the hyoid bone. The function of a full arm neck choke is to cutoff blood supply to the brain, which will knock you unconscious very quickly, and probably with little to no side effects when you wake up.

4752

Ya, it’s blocking the carotid. I didn’t think that was what this guy did to the guy… I thought he basically just had him in a headlock, and was holding him for a long time. The videos seemed to be showing him being held and restrained by like 3 dudes, so I didn’t think the guy was actually choking him out.

I could be totally mistaken though. If the story played out like Scott seems to be suggesting, and they actually choked him out immediately, and then just kept choking him for 15 minutes, that’s totally different than what I thought happened.