Virginia woman shot herself through the mouth while handcuffed, officials say - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.wric.com/amp/news/virginia-news/woman-shot-herself-through-mouth-while-handcuffed-during-traffic-stop-suicide-officials-say/1850161292 CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) -- A 19-year-old woman whose hands were cuffed behind her back when she committed suicide during a traffic stop in Chesapeake died of a gunshot wound through the mouth, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Sarah Wilson committed suicide on July 25, 2018, during a traffic stop near the intersection of Berkley Avenue and Wilson Road, according to the Chesapeake Police Department. She was the passenger of a 1996 Lexus driven by her boyfriend, 27-year-old Holden Medlin. The couple were under the surveillance of two CPD officers -- one assigned to uniform patrol, and the other to vice narcotics -- when they were stopped around 4:24 p.m. During the stop, the officers approached Wilson and Medlin separately. While one officer handcuffed Wilson with her hands behind her back, the other tried to detain Medlin, CPD Officer Leo Kosinski told WAVY in August. Medlin resisted arrest, becoming combative and trying to flee the scene. That's when the officer who handcuffed Wilson left her outside of the car's passenger side and went to assist in Medlin's arrest, which involved using a Taser to subdue him, according to police. Kosinski said in August that Wilson was handcuffed with her arms behind her back when she got the gun out of the Lexus, "contorted" her body and shot herself in the head.

I wonder why she did it. Seems pretty fucking rash to do something like that unless they had been committing some pretty serious crimes.

Do they expect anybody to buy this story?

He was charged with possession of oxycodone, possession of suboxone,possession of paraphernalia, possession of a firearm with a schedule I or II drug, fleeing from a law enforcement officer, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

They were also under surveillance by the police at the time they were stopped, so they were being investigated for some sort of criminal activity.

Not impossible I guess. If she dropped her head between her knees she could pull it off if she really wanted to, quite some commitment though.

Yeah read the article, she was with her boyfriend and the shot happened when they were going after him.

I can't go into the article, it's for yanks only.

Jesus Christ, this shit has to fucking stop. I know that the installation of bodycams is something we were all excited about to keep officers credible for their actions, but then this fucking shit happens where there are no overlying regulations enforcing strict reprimand for turning them off. Yeah it just conveniently turns off doesn't it? Just fucking happens on accident yeah real clever. Fucking assholes. We need to continue to keep officers accountable for being in these positions of authority.

Oh boy, here we fuckin go again. The US really is turning into Russia, what with their suicides from the back of the head.

There was no dash cam footage? Did the scuffle shut that off too?

The dumbest part about modern bodycams is that they only actually record if the officer hits the button

There are ideas to have body cams linked to guns being pulled with the safety off or something. But then you can't "accidentally" shoot people in the back of the head repeatedly.

I don't like that. It may seem like a good idea, but when the recording begins as the gun is pulled you lose a fuckton of context leading up to the point that required a weapon to be drawn. IE was the officer's life really in danger? Was pulling the gun necessary? These are important things to understand that can be lost without prior video recording.

Body-cams record the previous 30 seconds as well upon activation. Effectively, they're *always* recording, but nothing is *saved* until the button is pushed. Even my home security cameras do this.

Oh that's actually news to me. That's really genius and totally makes sense.

It's how they caught a cop planting drugs on a person's property. The cop turned his camera off to plant, then turned it back on when he rejoined his buddies, but the previous 30 seconds were saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/us/baltimore-officer-video-drugs.html

That's a lot of fucking bad apples.

He was found guilty, but only for trying to hide that he forgot to record the drug discovery. Baltimore Police officer found guilty of fabricating evidence...

Honestly you shouldn't be able to turn a body cam off and any officer's actions while one is off should be placed under heavy scruteny.

I can understand being able to turn them off if you're, like, taking a shit or whatever, but if you're on a call/on the scene there shouldn't be a means of turning them off.

Another daughter claimed by our nation's justice system

But like How would the device know

The cops were visiting the local cathedrals and the 123 metre spire sent them into an insatiable blood lust.

So I am ready to accept that this is potentially (probably) murder. What I am now wondering is... why? What reason did the police officer have to do something like this, assuming he did?

Remote control? They have laptops in their squad cars, just link it to those.

My only thing on that is they could go out of range of any connection they could have to their laptop. To counter this you could put a cellular network card in them and make them a slave device that would report back to a master server every so often about their status and log it. Log things like power on, power off, battery level, recording status, gps local if you wanted even.

There has to be a system in place that prevents malicious shut downs and also protects officers privacy so they're not being recorded while using bathrooms, etc.

I genuinely can't think of a way to do it that isn't massively open for abuse. Given that the police are public servants, I'm comfortable reducing their privacy to a certain extent. Not entirely sure what to do about bathrooms, but I'm open to ideas.

Is there a story that says what kind of gun it was? If it was a handgun I call shenanigans, but if its a longer gun like a shotgun or rifle you can easily get it in your mouth and use your toe on the trigger.