A DEATH IN EDMONDS

Last New Year's Eve, Danielle Mccarthy Took Ecstasy for the First
Time With Some Friends. the Puyallup Teenager Died on New Year's Day.
the State of Washington Has Charged Mccarthy's Friends in Her Death.
But What If the Drugs Didn't Kill Mccarthy?

Danielle McCarthy was like a lot of 16-year-olds. She wore
Hollister-brand clothes, worked at Orange Julius at the mall, and
attended one of those giant suburban high schools. Until December
2006, she'd never taken ecstasy. But she knew plenty of people at
Rogers High School in Puyallup, Washington, who had used it,
including Donalydia Huertas, a fellow junior.

Danielle and her school buddy Kelsey Kerston thought ecstasy was
dangerous--"you can die on the first try," Danielle and Kelsey
agreed--but at some point, without telling Kelsey, Danielle changed
her mind. With New Year's Eve approaching, Danielle decided to spend
$50 she had saved for a navel piercing on ecstasy instead. Kelsey
would be with them on New Year's Eve, but Kelsey wasn't supposed to
know that Danielle and Dona were high.

At 8:00 p.m. on December 31, the girls met at Dona's house. Photos
from a digital camera show them posing, puckering, and gussying
themselves up in front of a vanity mirror. Two cars full of friends
arrived to pick the girls up at 9:00 p.m. and take them to a house
party in Edmonds. David Morris, a 20-year-old friend of Dona's, drove
a Jeep that had room for just two passengers. Dona and Danielle rode
in the Jeep. Kelsey rode in another vehicle--throughout the night
Kelsey was the odd girl out.

The red Cherokee drove north on I-5. David handed over pills of
ecstasy to Dona, and Dona handed him cash. Both girls took a pill.

The two cars arrived in Edmonds about an hour later. Ryan Mills, 19
years old, was hosting a New Year's Eve party at his mother's house.
Mills's mother was away. Inside, about 18 people in their late teens
and early 20s were smoking pot and drinking. Danielle opened a can of
beer, but Dona warned her not to drink--alcohol and ecstasy are a bad
combination, she said. Danielle chugged it anyway. Kelsey was
drinking shots of Vox vodka.

Less than an hour later, still before midnight, about eight of the
revelers decided to leave for a party in Seattle's University
District. On the way, the cars stopped at a gas station to rendezvous
with a friend whose clutch had burned out on the freeway. Danielle
told Dona that the ecstasy "wasn't kicking in." Dona and Danielle
both took another pill. The New Year arrived as they sat in the parking lot.

When they reached the party on Greek Row, Danielle got out of the car
and immediately became ill, vomiting again and again. She urinated on
herself. David and Dona cleaned her up and took care of her. Guys in
the group returned periodically, one with a bottle of Aquafina, but
Danielle couldn't hold down water. Dona assured friends that Danielle
was fine, insisting she just had too much to drink.

At 3:30 a.m., the frat-row parties died down. Danielle slumped with
her head down on the drive back in the Jeep. Back in Edmonds, Dona
and David helped Danielle walk back into Ryan Mills's house. Danielle
was still somewhat coherent but she was slipping in and out of
consciousness, periodically waking up to vomit. If there was any
suspicion that Danielle was having a bad reaction to the ecstasy or
that something else was seriously wrong, what happened next should
have confirmed it: At around 4:00 a.m. Danielle tensed up. She began
to shake. She looked like she was having a seizure.

Nobody called 911.

Danielle's seizure lasted about five minutes, and after it ended she
appeared to fall asleep. Other people began going to sleep in various
rooms of the house. Some members of the group said they woke up at
6:30 a.m., but others claimed it wasn't until 8:30 a.m. that Ryan
Mills started dinging a cowbell to wake the group. Danielle looked
terrible. Her face was cold to the touch; her lips were blue. So,
once again, the group had to make a decision. They could call 911,
they could drive Danielle to the hospital, or they could take matters
into their own hands.

Some guys carried Danielle to a tub they had filled with warm water,
where Dona splashed water on Danielle's face. But Danielle was
unresponsive. After 15 minutes, one of them lifted Danielle's arm and
let go. Instead of relaxing, Danielle's muscles stiffened and her
hand hardened into a cup. Everyone panicked.

But they still didn't call 911.

Ryan Mills, the host of the party, went online and found Danielle's
symptoms were consistent with an ecstasy overdose. But Ryan didn't
want anyone to call 911. "We were all scared because we had, like, a
party there the night before," Mills would later tell investigators.
"We didn't want anyone to get in trouble." Most of the people at the
house had taken ecstasy, and at this point David and Dona were
admitting that Danielle had, too. Calling 911 guaranteed that they
would be arrested. So, instead, David and Dona wrapped Danielle in a
comforter, hoisted her into the Cherokee, and drove her to Stevens
Hospital. They carried her into the emergency room. At 9:43
a.m.--nearly eight hours after Danielle's first symptoms, and five
and a half hours after the apparent seizure--a doctor reported that
her body was cold to the touch. Her jaw was already set in rigor mortis.

That is how 16-year-old Danielle Dawn McCarthy died, on New Year's
Day 2007, according to records at the Snohomish County Superior
Court--records that charge David Morris and Donalydia Huertas with homicide.

In Washington, when a person dies from taking an illegal drug, the
individual who supplied the drug has committed "controlled-substances
homicide," according to a law passed in 1987. It's the equivalent of
holding a gun dealer liable if someone shoots himself.

"It was clear who gave her the drugs and who sold her the drugs,"
said Deputy Prosecutor Coleen St. Clair of the Snohomish County
Superior Court, who is handling the case.

A detective interviewing David Morris on New Year's Day had
ascertained that he'd sold Dona and Danielle the ecstasy and placed
him under arrest. But Dona, who gave Danielle the drugs, and was just
17 at the time, wasn't charged until May 2007.

The penalty for administering a lethal dose of a drug is usually 51
to 68 months in prison for adults. The penalty for juveniles is
typically a month in jail.

"[Huertas] was made a plea offer [in juvenile court] and she rejected
it," said St. Clair, "and if you don't accept the state's plea you'll
be charged with what you should have been charged with to begin
with." Huertas is now charged with manslaughter in the first
degree--in adult court--in addition to the drug-homicide charge. If
she's found guilty, Dona Huertas could be sent to prison for six and
a half to eight and a half years.

"The difference is the controlled-substances homicide is a strict
liability crime," St. Clair said, but the first-degree manslaughter
charge is reserved for reckless disregard. To demonstrate Dona's
disregard, an affidavit pieces together an account of the night's
events to argue that Dona repeatedly rejected efforts to save Danielle.

The most damning evidence is about a dozen quotes attributed to Dona
over the evening by Danielle's friend Kelsey Kerston, who recounted
the night's events, with her father by her side, to a King County detective.

"Please don't let me die," Danielle begged while vomiting next to the
car, according to Kelsey. When Kelsey offered to help, Dona allegedly
told her, "Shut the fuck up and get the fuck away.... Danielle
doesn't need your help. There's nothing wrong with her.... Stop
asking and shut the fuck up, and get the fuck out of here." When
Kelsey demanded to know whether Danielle had taken drugs, Dona
allegedly barked, "Shut the fuck up. She's not on anything."

Incriminating details--but this is Kelsey's version of events, and
the rest of her story doesn't match those provided by other witnesses.

For example, while Kelsey went inside one of the parties on Greek
Row, Dona and David tended to Danielle--by the account of a
half-dozen witnesses--for nearly three hours. But when the detective
asked Kelsey how long the group was in the University District,
Kelsey insisted they were only on Greek Row for 20 to 25 minutes,
"and then we went straight back to Ryan Mills's house." The detective
also asked about the car ride to Seattle.

DETECTIVE: "Anything happen between the party [in Edmonds] and
getting to [the party in the University District]? I mean, as far as
stopping anywhere, anything like that?"

KELSEY KERSTON: "Um-um."

DETECTIVE: "Somebody's car break down?"

KELSEY KERSTON: "No."

DETECTIVE: "No?"

KELSEY KERSTON: "Um-um."

DETECTIVE: "So you left [Edmonds] at 11:30, let's say, so you got
there and you already went to the gas station according to what you're saying."

KELSEY KERSTON: "I just, I shouldn't like, I should not have drink
[sic], that's all I'm saying."

DETECTIVE: "Okay. So that'd be two and a half, three hours."

KELSEY KERSTON: "We were not there that long."

DETECTIVE: "Okay."

KELSEY KERSTON: "We weren't."

Kelsey forgot spending a significant amount of time at a gas station
and appears to have lost track of about three hours that night, and
excuses the lapses by explaining she "shouldn't have drink." And
Dona, on ecstasy, is alleged to have screamed expletives at Kelsey.
(The drug, methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, overwhelms the
user with such intense feelings of love and happiness that the drug
was recently approved federally for clinical trials to treat
post-traumatic stress disorder.) Nevertheless, prosecutors used
Kelsey's account of the night to make their case in an affidavit of
probable cause.

None of the holes in the case excuses Dona, David, Kelsey, or anyone
else in the group for failing to call 911. But despite an entire
group's failure to respond, the charges brought against two
individuals rely heavily on the testimony of one person--whose
accounts of the evening are spotty. (I called Kelsey Kerston, but her
mother refused to let me speak with her. I also spoke to Danielle's
parents; they agreed to meet for an interview and then cancelled.
David Morris' attorney said he could not answer questions about the
case. And Dona Huertas' attorney did not return my calls.)

On November 30, 2007, David made a plea agreement with prosecutors,
agreeing to testify against Dona in exchange for a shorter sentence.
The deal may seem odd, because everyone saw that Danielle was
seriously ill, knew she had taken ecstasy, and didn't call for help.
And Danielle, according to Kelsey, even asked people not to let her
mom find out. So everyone at the party bears some responsibility for
what happened that night.

But pinning the blame on a single participant--with all parties
testifying against that one defendant, who is left with no one else
to snitch on--is a classic drug-law enforcement technique. And,
characteristic of drug enforcement's racial disparity in
prosecutions, the person who stands to serve the harshest penalty is
the only non-Caucasian directly involved in the case, Dona Huertas.

Huertas is currently free on bail; her trial begins in Snohomish
County Superior Court on January 25.

"This is a hot charge right now," says Douglas Hiatt, a criminal
defense attorney defending a client facing similar accusations in
Lewis County. A recent flourish of newspaper articles indicates
rising popularity for the controlled-substance-homicide charge among
Washington prosecutors. (The state attorney general's office failed
to respond to my requests for records related to the number of
charges and prosecutions.) In a similar case in Clark County, just
across the Columbia River from Portland, 19-year-old Stetzon W. Sharp
reportedly supplied a 15-year-old girl with ecstasy at a party in his
apartment. After the girl complained she was too warm, partygoers
rushed her to a hospital--much quicker to act than Danielle's
friends--but brain swelling and seizures took her life within a
couple hours. A Clark County judge sentenced Sharp to more than eight
years in prison.

In every fatal overdose case, the drugs came from someone. But as the
prosecutor, St. Clair, explained, the controlled-substance-homicide
charge is uncommon because in most cases the overdose victim is
"alone when they were found so you can't make that connection" to the
supplier. But instead of preventing overdose deaths, prosecutions
like these may result in more deaths. The state of Washington's
position is clear: If someone calls 911 when a friend is overdosing,
not only does the witness risk charges for possessing or selling
drugs (which 911 callers in these situations have feared since the
passage of the Controlled Substances Act), but he or she could be
charged with homicide, too. The end result? Overdose victims--who
might survive with prompt medical care--may be abandoned and left to die.

"It goes in the wrong direction and cuts against overdose prevention,
overdose reporting, and taking someone to the hospital," says defense
attorney Hiatt. "If I give you the drugs, I'll be less likely to take
you to the hospital."

I can relate. When I was 17, a friend who had taken five hits of LSD
showed up at my house during a small party. He misheard a
conversation and believed we thought he was gay. He began to worry
that his attraction to women was a charade--it wasn't--and then
spiraled into an acid-induced state of terror. He began babbling like
R2-D2, holding his breath until his head looked like a plum, and
trying to claw out his eyes. I called 911.

A fleet of screaming ambulances and police cars arrived at my
parents' house. I didn't think twice about opening the door and
directing them to my deranged shell of a friend. But no sooner had
they crossed the threshold than a cadre of police officers escorted
me to the basement, where they handcuffed me to a chair. Officers
interrogated me for hours, threatening to search my house. (My
parents are out of town so I can't give you permission, officer, and
besides, there's no acid at the house, nope, and he took it before he
arrived, yup.) The officers finally left, but not until midmorning.
My wrists were bruised from the cuffs and I've never looked at a
police officer quite the same way again.

I spent the next couple of months explaining to my scowling parents
and suspicious neighbors that I did the right thing: I called 911
when a friend overdosed. But I ended up being treated like a criminal.

"I read a story about four or five years ago about a drug overdose
downtown," says Adam Kline, state senator of Washington's 37th
District (around Seattle's Mount Baker neighborhood). "People stood
around watching; nobody dared call the cops, and the guy died on the
street," says Kline. "I imagine the very rational fear of arrest. It
has got to cloud people's judgment."

Monte Levine, a member of the Kitsap County Substance Abuse Advisory
Board, says, "There is a balance of weighing personal fear over doing
what is right and humane." A woman near Levine's Bremerton home had
that fear become reality: "A person was overdosing and she called to
save the person's life," he says. "She was arrested."

When mothers abandon their unwanted newborns--which happens with
alarming frequency--they must decide whether to leave an infant in a
Dumpster, where the child is likely to die, or in a public place,
where the child's likelihood of survival is higher but so are the
chances that the mother will be seen by witnesses, arrested, and
prosecuted. The pandemic of abandoned newborns in the 1990s spawned a
popular movement to declare emergency rooms and other medical
facilities "safe havens" where mothers could abandon newborns without
risking arrest. In 2002, the Washington State Legislature passed such a law.

A law that encourages people to call 911 when someone is overdosing
would be grounded in the same impulse: It's better to save lives than
to prosecute every crime. But saving the lives of newborn babies is
an easy sell and saving the lives of drug users is not.

But a life is a life to Senator Kline, who introduced legislation
that would provide amnesty to people who call 911 to report an
overdose. The bill, first introduced in 2005 and reintroduced in 2007
(remaining active in the 2008 session), states, "A person shall not
be charged, subject to civil forfeiture, or otherwise prosecuted for
a [drug offense] if... the person reported the drug overdose to law
enforcement or summoned medical assistance at the time it was witnessed...."

But the bill, SB 5348, includes two exceptions: The bill stipulates
that people can still be prosecuted in cases where the person who
reported the overdose sold the drugs to the victim or in cases where
the victim dies and controlled-substance-homicide charges result.

Those exceptions undermine the bill's intent. Taking drugs is often
communal, and buying them is also a group activity, where one person
obtains the drugs from a dealer and others reimburse that person for
the cost of the drugs, but no profit is made on this second "sale."
To complicate matters, the bill applies only to cases where the
person reporting the overdose believes there is a threat to the
victim's life. So, basically, witnesses have to wait until they're
certain that the overdosing person is dying before they call 911--and
if the person does die, the proposed law offers no protection.

Kline concedes the bill has flaws, but believes the concessions are
necessary if the bill, which in its three years has never reached a
floor vote in the state senate, is to become law in 2008. "In a
perfect world," says Kline, "there would be an absolute privilege to
call the cops or the medics when there is an imminent threat on the
life of a human being, and there would be no exceptions." But it
isn't a perfect world, or a perfect legislature, so Kline says the
exceptions are necessary.

But if Kline's bill were to become law, would drug users understand
the specific circumstances under which they would have immunity?
Let's say another man is dying of a drug overdose on a downtown
street. Would the people watching even know of the law? And if they
did, would they know that the law's protections were ambiguous and
assume that first-responding officers would construe the law
narrowly, and choose not to call 911?

In New Mexico, drug users know about a "Good Samaritan" law enacted
there this June--the first of its kind to become law--but "they think
it's a joke," says Reena Szczepanski, director of the Drug Policy
Alliance's New Mexico office, one of the legislation's backers. "They
think the DEA will try to get around it."

Szczepanski says the New Mexico Department of Health distributes
palm-sized cards to drug users about the limitations of immunity. One
side explains that people calling 911 for overdose victims won't be
arrested for drug possession; the other says there are no protections
from charges for drug dealing, outstanding warrants, or parole or
probation violations. In cases where people have called 911 to report
an overdose in New Mexico, "police have arrived before the
ambulances," says Szczepanski, and "put everyone on the floor to
secure the scene while their friend is dying on the floor."

What message do these heavy-handed tactics send?

"Don't even try saving your friend's life," says Szczepanski, "we're
going to arrest you."

It may have been easy to save Danielle McCarthy's life. "MDMA use in
sufficient dose or under the right circumstances can be fatal, but
that is very rare," explains Dr. Thomas Martin, of the Washington
Poison Center and an associate professor at the University of
Washington. "An overdose from two pills is very unlikely."

According to a statement issued February 5, the Snohomish County
Medical Examiner's Office ruled that Danielle's official cause of
death was acute intoxication of ecstasy. But McCarthy's toxicology
report indicates she had a postmortem concentration of only 0.31
milligrams of MDMA per liter of blood. Although a handful of
fatalities with MDMA in that concentration have been reported, that
dose is generally considered nontoxic. (Other MDMA users have been
documented with 20 times the concentration of MDMA found in
Danielle's blood--and they exhibited only a hangover and hypertension.)

Danielle's toxicology report also showed slight presence of MDA, a
drug very similar to MDMA, and caffeine. This indicates the pills she
consumed were not completely pure, which, in pills sold as ecstasy,
is very common.

But unreleased portions of Danielle's toxicology report reveal
something unusual: a high level of ketones, acids produced by the
body when it breaks down fat for energy, and glucose at 500
milligrams per deciliter in Danielle's urine. (Information regarding
the toxicology report was provided to The Stranger by a confidential source.)

If this information is accurate, Danielle McCarthy may have been
suffering from undiagnosed diabetes. "This presentation of a very
high glucose level and high levels of ketones could have been due to
a complication of undiagnosed diabetes known as diabetic
ketoacidosis," says Martin.

Ketoacidosis causes nausea and vomiting and can induce a diabetic
coma--the same symptoms reportedly exhibited by Danielle on the night
she died. If Danielle had been taken to a hospital, these symptoms
could have been treated quickly; regulating her blood sugar and
providing other basic medical treatment could have saved her life.

"I think that it is only apparent that MDMA use preceded a downward
spiral that led to her death but didn't necessarily cause or
contribute to it," Martin says. However, he notes, "if she did have a
seizure, that is less common in DKA [diabetic ketoacidosis] and more
common with MDMA toxicity."

The extent to which MDMA is actually toxic has been the source of
controversy. George Ricaurte of Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine and colleagues concluded in 2002 that the drug causes severe
neurotoxicity. Users are virtually guaranteed, the scientist
reported, to develop Parkinson's disease or similar nervous-system
conditions as they age. However, the findings, after being widely
accepted, were dismissed the next year. Ricaurte admitted the
researchers accidentally injected primate test subjects with
methamphetamine, not ecstasy, after two labels on the bottles were switched.

In the vast majority of ecstasy-related fatalities, it is not
toxicity that kills the victims, but complications, such as
heatstroke, dehydration, or, as may have been the case with Danielle,
the drug triggering a preexisting medical condition.

"Some patients tolerate a certain level well; others don't," says
William T. Hurley, MD, of the Washington Poison Center. "Anyone with
a challenged reserve, due to a disease like untreated diabetes, would
do less well with MDMA toxicity."

If Danielle was an undiagnosed diabetic, other drugs--even legal
ones, such as diet Red Bull or pseudoephedrine--could have triggered
her downward spiral. She may have started down the same physiological
path of lightheadedness, nausea, and ketoacidosis. In any of these
other scenarios, however, Danielle or someone around her would almost
certainly have called 911.

Everyone likes to believe they would immediately call 911 if they
witnessed an overdose. But the fact is, the fear of being arrested
and sent to prison for 5 to 10 years could make even the most
compassionate person take pause. Is the person actually that sick?
What if he is just passed out... would he want to wake up under
arrest in a hospital room? If I call 911, what will happen to all the
people at this party--will they be sent to prison because of my phone
call? These ramifications may vex a reasonable person--and certainly
one who is high and panicked.

If I had known as a teenager what I know now about how Washington's
law enforcement handles overdoses, and how the police would treat me,
in this situation I probably would have disposed of any evidence that
could be used against me, my friends, or my tripping friend before I
called for help. But that time would also waste precious minutes,
delaying treatment, all to avoid a potential criminal prosecution.

It was the fear of criminal prosecution that prevented Danielle's
friends from doing the right thing and saving her life on that New
Year's Day. The negligence of her friends, ecstasy, possibly
undiagnosed diabetes, and strictly punitive drug policies all
conspired to kill Danielle McCarthy.

But only Donalydia Huertas is on trial.