Positional asphyxia, also known as postural asphyxia, is a form of asphyxia which occurs when someone's position prevents them from breathing adequately. A small but significant number of people die suddenly and without apparent reason during restraint by police, prison (corrections) officers and health care staff.[1] Positional asphyxia may be a factor in some of these deaths.
- Positional asphyxia is a potential danger of some physical restraint techniques,
- People may die from positional asphyxia by simply getting themselves into a breathing-restricted position they cannot get out of, either through carelessness or as a consequence of another accident.
| 1607 | An expedition of English colonists went ashore at Cape Henry, Va., to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. (They later settled at Jamestown.) |
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| 1785 | Naturalist and artist John James Audubon was born in Haiti. |
| 1865 | John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded and killed by federal troops near Bowling Green, Va. |
| 1937 | Planes from Nazi Germany raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. |
| 1945 | Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested. |
| 1964 | The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania. |
| 1989 | Actress-comedian Lucille Ball died at age 77. |
| 1998 | Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading Guatemalan human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death two days after a report he'd compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public. |
| 2000 | Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions. |
| 2005 | Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon ended as Syrian soldiers completed a withdrawal brought about by international pressure and Lebanese street protests. |
| 2008 | Police in Austria arrested a man accused of holding his daughter captive in a windowless cellar for 24 years, fathering her seven children and killing one of them. (Josef Fritzl is serving life in a psychiatric ward.) |
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