The Nile: Now in Garden City, NY

The husband of Diane Schuler, the woman who killed herself, her daughter, three of her niece, and three more innocent people in another vehicle she hit while going the wrong way down the Taconic State Parkway, has held a press conference. Earlier this week the toxicology reports on Mrs. Schuler were released, indicating that not only was she drunk at the time of the crash, she also had significant marijuana traces in her body, too. Mr. Schuler is saying that his wife never touched alcohol, nor drugs, and the toxicology reports couldn't possibly be true.

On the one hand, he's suffering a terrible loss, and I do have a great deal of sympathy for him. On the other hand, this sort of denial is often the sort of behavior that alcoholics count on from their loved ones to allow them to continue their behaviors. Given the facts of the case, starting with the crash, and then the reports from the brother about the disoriented call he had with Mrs. Schuler prior to the crash, something was going on. Even diabetic ketosis is insufficient to generate THC traces, even if it might account for the BAC levels. At this point, Occam's Razor is going to cut towards the idea that Diane Schuler was an addict. And denying the possibility of that is just going to make things worse for her remaining family.


The Nile, it's not just a river in Egypt.

How sad. I wonder how long it will take him to accept the truth, if he ever does, and if it would even be good for him to do so.

If she had lived to stand trial for the deaths of the people she killed, I wonder how long of a sentence she'd have got. Here in my town we just had a woman sentenced to 41 months(not years!!!) for going the wrong way down the highway while drunk, and plowing into another car, killing the driver.

Diabetic ketosis to account for her blood alcohol levels? I don't think so, but I'll do more research on that. Ketones are not ethanol, but maybe they create a false positive on the test.

I don't think his deep denial of the situation is a great thing, but it might be what he needs to get through this for now. Maybe at some point in the future he will be able to deal with reality better (or he'll have himself so firmly entrenched in denying it that he will never accept it).

Ketones may interfere with a breathalyzer, but she would have had blood samples drawn and analyzed for blood alcohol (and as a former lab tech, I can assure you that the procedures for blood draws to test for blood alcohol under conditions like this are strictly regulated), and while ketones in the blood may interfere, I'd like to think that the labs doing these tests would have accounted for that.

Reading the article, I see she had the equivalent of 10 drinks still in her stomach. Yeah, I don't think ketoacidosis was the problem.

10 drinks' worth of vodka still in the stomach? That pushes my Alcoholic-o-Meter firmly into the red. Someone who "never drinks," as the husband put it, would have thrown up in a real damn hurry after drinking that much booze.

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Originally posted by OneCentStamp

10 drinks' worth of vodka still in the stomach?

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How do you even drink that fast without puking it all back up?

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Originally posted by Harlequin

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Originally posted by OneCentStamp

10 drinks' worth of vodka still in the stomach?

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How do you even drink that fast without puking it all back up?

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Exactly. I couldn't do that, and I'm a 200+ lb guy who is a fairly solid drinker and not prone to puking. :dub:

I read yesterday that the husband claimed that he had NEVER seen her drunk in all the years that they were together..............

Maybe he's like one of those husbands who has never seen his wife without her make-up in 50 years of marriage. Maybe she was such a hardcore alcoholic that she was never *sober* (and told him the booze smell was just her diabetes). I dunno. None of it makes much sense.

Is he doing it just to try to mitigate the legal liabilities?

"This could look bad for OCP, Johnson. Scramble the best spin team we have."

I saw him on Larry King with his slimeball attorney, Dominic Barberra. (sp?). He almost NEVER averted his eyes from a fixed point off to the side and above the eyeline of the camera. Brilliant. He spoke in a carefully measured voice. Like he was testifying under oath.

He's an NYPD cop. He knows what he was doing. Barberra had coached him very well, he did his Larry King, stuck to the story despite Larry's working on the obvious painful fact: She was drunk and stoned.

Were she found to be drunk and stoned ( especially stoned ), he might well lose his job. This isn't about truth, or about protecting her beautiful memory, or about respect for all of the dead.

It's about covering his ass and keeping his shield. Very plain, very simple. They were married 13 YEARS and he never saw her drunk, yet they kept a bottle of vodka in a camper?? Look, getting drunk ain't a crime. Getting drunk 2 weekends outa 4 in the summer ain't a crime. It's called being an adult. And yet he has taken the extreme De Nile stance.

Pathetic. She is a murderer of the highest grade- she slayed both her offspring AND strangers.

:fist:

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