Is it possible that a medical condition (other than alcoholism) could make a woman drink vodka and smoke pot while driving an SUV with children?

I assume that you’re not expecting an affirmative response.

I wonder what the hell medical condition it could possibly be. I heard that someone mentioned that…but even reading that case makes me cry :( She better damn have something documented, if not…well, it sounds a lot like psychosis but no one will ever know. Maybe the surviving child can shed some light on it, if he ever recovers mentally.

Yes, it’s a medical condition known as idiocy.

Non jokingly, I have heard of no diseases that would cause this behaviour.

Applying Occam’s razor here, we could probably construct a detailed medical scenario to explain it all, but it seems way more likely that this person was dumb, drank and smoked weed, and drove when she had no ability to. Or she suffered a mental instability and turned to alcohol and driving in rapid succession (it seems the vodka bottle was found in her car, and I would discredit the weed because it can last in the blood for a long time depending on how regular of a toker she was, and even if she wasn’t she could have smoked earlier on that day… oh I just read a newspaper article here, since they were at a campground, perhaps the adults shared a joint one night, that would be an easy explanation).

Diabetes can cause drunken behaviour (stumbling, slurred speech) if the person has a low enough blood sugar. But the solution is to consume something sugary, not alcohol. Any diabetic knows this. Thus I don’t give much weight to that theory.

As for a stroke making her drink, well I’m no medical professional, but I’ve been under the impression that a stroke would be more onset and give her less time to, oh, acquire and consume a bottle of alcohol. It could explain the final collision, but not the alcohol in the stomach. Furthermore, if she was indeed having problems forming words she should have had enough time to PULL OVER THE DAMN CAR! Failure to do that indicates her judgment was impaired. Wonder what could have caused that.

It’s the bottle of alcohol here that’s the question. That and she seemed perfectly fine before leaving the campground with the children, but four and a half hours later, she was dead with vodka in her stomach and a bottle in the car. The easiest solution points to for whatever reason she got drunk and crashed her car. But I am not a judge nor jury, so I will wait for the final results of the investigation to determine what happened.

We were discussing this at dinner last night, and no one came up with anything. A psychological breakdown, perhaps; but nothing medical.

We were wondering how and where she would have purchased the marijuana? Alcohol is easy toacquire as an adult, but if you don’t already have connections, a lot of conscious effort has to go into finding and buying pot, and into preparing it for consumption (e.g. rolling it, putting it in a pipe, or baking it into brownies).

Maybe she had multiple personality disorder or something, but no physical event that I know if could cause someone to suddenly binge to such an extreme.

@dynamicduo, on the Today Show this morning, they’re now saying it was the husband’s vodka that she had in the car. How convenient.

I am diabetic and the diabetes theory makes me LAUGH, it’s so ridiculous.

I think they KNOW this case will go to court and they are trying to contaminate the potential jury pool by creating the reasonable doubt the jury will have to ponder.

People with bipolar disorder often self-medicate with alcohol and pot. If she was undiagnosed with a mental disorder, it might be possible to guess if we knew more about her behavior in the years before the accident.

And the business about the husband not being able to address the marijuana because of his job…what kind of bull is THAT?!!!

@daloon: People with many psychological problems self-medicate. The issue is that the family is trying to make it sound like she was an angel before this isolated incident.

As for @dynamicduo‘s campground joint theory, it seems plausible. I don’t know how much was in her bloodstream. For a moment, I wondered if the weed could have been laced with something that caused a psychotic break, but that would have turned up in the toxicology results, too.

It is a very sad situation. What could the case go to court for?

The part of this I don’t get is the family insisting “She wasn’t an alcoholic!!” Okay. Yeah, and? As though alcoholics are the only ones who’ve ever gotten drunk? Who’ve ever drove drunk? All it takes is ONE stupid decision to cause a fatal car accident. You don’t have to be an alcoholic to down a bottle of vodka.

@hearkat Vehicular Homicide, brought by the family of the three men in the SUV, against the widower, if he somehow “knew” his wife would be putting lives in danger.

And what could they gain? Their family members will still be dead. He has lost most of his family. What is the point?

@hearkat Revenge, anger, justice? <shrug> They’ve lost three members of their family too. I doubt anyone’s thinking overly clearly at the moment.

No doubt the civil suit would pay far more money if it can be proven the husband is not so innocent.

It’s interesting the family does not want to exhume the body and do another autopsy. They KNOW what the results will be and don’t want to waste the money maybe?

No. Also, the results of the tests are highly likely to have been accurate.

i dont think anything can make you be that much of a dumbass.

@hearkat The question merely asked if it were possible if a medical condition other than alcoholism could be related. I was just offering one example where it is possible. There could be many others, too. The issue of what the family claims is kind of irrelevant to the question, as stated in the title.

I will point out, too, that if she were bipolar, or anything else involved deep depression, this could have been suicide, as well. Since one reason not to commit suicide is that you need to be there to take care of your kids, killing the kids, too would take care of that problem. So even if she weren’t alcoholic or a druggy, she might use those substances at that time in order to generate the courage to carry out the act.

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure what she was thinking (or not thinking) about. I think that her family might not even know, since it is possible to hide substance abuse, and even mental instability, especially from people who do not wish to see. Further, if they didn’t do anything when they suspected they saw something, they could be feeling an enormous amount of guilt, which might lead them to deny the signs of trouble.

If we do get any further information about her behavior and medical condition before the alleged “accident,” we’ll only be able to hypothesize that it was related to her actions that caused the deaths. We’ll never know her state of mind for sure.

Speculating on the causes of her behavior is probably just as speculative on our part as it is on the part of her surviving family. They, presumably, have more information, but that doesn’t mean they can come up with a better explanation. People are fascinated with wrecks of all kinds. It’s dramatic and shocking, and a great source of discussion. Whether we can learn anything from the brouhaha is also a matter of debate.

Unless Instant Onset Bipolar Schizophrenia hit her while she was driving (or was a previous but controlled condition), then I say no. No disease exists that would explain why she did what she did.

@deni, obviously you have never lived in the Midwest. There are all sorts of dumbasses just like that around here. It is damn near epidemic. =)

@daloon: The point I was trying to make was that if she had been self-medicating (for any psychological or physical problem), there would probably be some prior evidence of it prior to this extreme binge.

My gut reaction was also suicide. To me it seems that she made a conscious decision to take out herself and the kids, and in order to see it through, she chose to get inebriated.

But why kill the BROTHER’S kids?

I suspect that the defense is focusing on recasting the event that led to the wrong way driving (and therefore deaths) by suggesting that a medical condition (diabetes or stroke) was the primary cause of the erratic behavior. They want us to believe that the pot and alcohol were coincidental, the proverbial red herrings.
That’s a very different scenario than trying to say that diabetes or stroke led to drinking vodka and smoking pot. Could public gullibilty extend that far? Pretty hard to believe.

But the alcohol can not be a red herring. Whether or not she had a medical condition, having TWICE the legal limit of alcohol in one’s system, which we have to assume she DID, alone could cause her to do what she did. They found it in her system AND in her stomach. They say if the alcohol in her stomach would have reached her system, she’d have FOUR times the amount!

The defense IS trying to explain the excessive drinking, which they claim she never did, as being caused by her “illness”. That’s why they talk about the abscess in her mouth (maybe she was in pain)?

I vote for @dynamicduo‘s choice of rampant idiocy, although I can see that overwhelming immaturity or self-centeredness could do it.

Of course, we all know that the CIA could have targeted her in order to punish her husband for sending money to help feed orphans in the Middle East.

@Darwin I have it on good authority that she was ordered to kill those children because they were all failed alien experiments and were about to be uncovered.

what i don’t understand is why she had the kids in the car and the husband, who also left the campground at the same time, only had the camping equipment. they said the wife called her brother in long island and told him she was not feeling well, and he told her to pull over, but she did not, and the family set out to search for her. now, if your husband is on the road at the same time you are, and you don’t feel well, why not call him and tell him “hey, i don’t feel well, let’s get in your car.” i heard speculation he told her he had an affair, and that’s why she was so adamant about not being in his car, and why she was drinking huge amounts. please don’t start criticizing me, i am not saying your husband having an affair justifies the drinking and driving. just repeating a theory i heard.

In any case, her problems are over now.

@jca, I’ve been following it closely since, to me, it’s “local” news. Nothing about an affair. There IS talk about him loosing parental rights of the 5 year old in the hospital if he knew the wife was drunk when she took off with the kids. Is that in the best interest of an ailing 5 year old who lost his mommy and sister and three cousins? After all that’s happened to him, being placed in a foster home can’t be good.

And I CAN understand why the husband would only have the equipment. Done in that way, the wife doesn’t have to load or unload any of the equipment, nor have to worry about it if she and the kids want to stop somewhere for a bite.

@Quagmire -i live in westchester, so it’s very local for me, too. the affair was what we were speculating on, definitely not in the news. that was to answer the question of why she was drinking so heavily, and why she did not ask for the husband’s assistance when she felt sick.

also, same thing for why he had only the equipment. i definitely understand the mom taking the kids all together, probably mutually agreed on all around, but why again, when she felt sick or whatever the call was she made to her bro in LI, why not make that call to the hubby and tell him hey, i’m sick, come help me out.

everyone agrees there’s more to this story and it will come out. it’s totally baffling. i work in WP and last week the news trucks were in front of the DA’s office. i know it’s a child welfare issue now, i feel bad for the hubby who lost these kids and wife and now has this crap. at least he has a lawyer.

I heard on the Today show that the husband has a DUI on his record from the past. I’m beginning to think that they were BOTH drunk and high that day and the reason she called the brother instead of the husband is that she knew the husband HIMSELF was under the influence.

Yes. She has Antisocial Personality Disorder.