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Answers scarce in teen's Ecstasy death
Friday, August 24, 2001 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Correction/Clarification: (Published Aug. 25, 2001) In yesterday's story about the death of a 16-year-old girl who ingested the drug Ecstasy at a recent rock concert, we identified the victim, Brandy French, as a sophomore at Quaker Valley High School. In reality, she attended Ambridge Area High School.
Somehow, teen-age rites of passage turned lethal this spring when a 16-year-old girl attending her first rock concert took the drug Ecstasy for the first time and collapsed later at a Bell Acres home.
An inquest was held at the Allegheny County coroner's office yesterday to try to determine why Ambridge Area High School sophomore Brandy French died, and whether others should face criminal charges or other legal action.
The inquiry was also a forum for broader questions about the increasingly popular drug, an amphetamine that makes many people feel euphoric but can also kill.
Why did Brandy overdose on Ecstasy, leading to the brain damage that killed her, while the two friends who took it with her at the concert remained fine?
In a time when people buck 80-million-to-1 odds to play lotteries, Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht asked, why do they ignore the million-to-one odds that an illegal drug will kill them?
"This is a case that cries out for public discussion, which is why we have called this," Wecht said at the beginning of the inquest, which he then left to be presided over by attorney John Doherty.
Answers were not clear. Yesterday's inquiry, which featured detailed testimony on illicit drug use by several teen-agers, was recessed after nine witnesses and will be reconvened Sept. 5.
No charges have been filed in Brandy's May 19 death, the day after she attended the outdoor X-Fest concert at the Post-Gazette Pavilion in Hanover, Washington County.
Yesterday's session was an open inquest investigating Brandy's death to determine whether homicide charges should be filed. Attorneys for Brandy's father, Donald French of Beaver County, are also likely to use the testimony to decide whether to file civil lawsuits against Brandy's friends, the owners of the home in which she collapsed or the concert venue.
French's lawyer, John Gismondi, hinted that someone should be held responsible.
"We want to see people understand what their responsibilities are when a friend's in trouble," he said during a break in yesterday's testimony. "Help should have been called much sooner for this girl. If it was, she'd be alive today."
According to testimony, Brandy and three friends traveled the day before the concert to the parking lot of a Dairy Queen in Rochester, where one of her friends, 17-year-old Michelle Maranuk, bought three Ecstasy pills from a young man.
The white pills were double-sized, meaning they had the power of two Ecstasy doses, and imprinted with a car logo. Brandy stayed the night with the friends -- including Robert Sontag, 21, and Paula Wilson, 18 -- and the next morning went with them to the concert.
Witnesses said Maranuk -- who did not testify yesterday -- hid the pills in her bra to avoid detection by pavilion security guards. Around noon the three girls went into a bathroom and each took half a pill. Everybody was dancing and having a good time and a few hours later the girls took the rest of the drugs.
Soon Brandy, who was 4 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 98 pounds, began throwing up, sweating and mumbling. She threw up about 20 times, worrying her friends, said one witness, Nicole Dinuno, 16.
Eventually the group, which now included Dinuno and Lewis Hopkins Jr., 19, decided to take Brandy to Hopkins' house in Bell Acres. They left the venue around 8 p.m. and arrived at the Hopkins house on Camp Meeting Road around 9:30 p.m.
The group told Rosalind Hopkins, Lewis' mother, that Brandy was drunk and needed to sleep it off upstairs. No one mentioned that Brandy, who was still mumbling and nearly comatose, took Ecstasy.
At this point in the testimony, which was taken with witnesses sequestered outside the courtroom, descriptions became contradictory.
After about an hour, Brandy fell out of her upstairs bed. After checking on her, Sontag, Dinuno and Lewis Hopkins said Brandy was breathing strangely. Sontag and Dinuno both said they announced Brandy should be taken to a hospital. Hopkins said she was soon breathing normally again.
Rosalind Hopkins said Brandy appeared drunk and sleepy and that she saw no strange breathing. At one point, after someone mentioned calling paramedics, she testified that she wasn't "really crazy about [paramedics] being here. Who would be?"
It seemed Brandy was getting better, to the relief of Maranuk, Dinuno testified.
"I'm over the fact that I killed Brandy," she said she heard Maranuk say.
Sometime around midnight, after Rosalind and Lewis Hopkins took Dinuno home, the group decided to take Brandy to the hospital. Sontag and Lewis Hopkins carried her downstairs.
Sontag said they called 911 when Brandy stopped breathing; Hopkins said it was when she became incontinent. Wilson and Rosalind Hopkins tried to revive her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
When paramedics arrived at 12:51, 10 minutes after being called, Brandy had no pulse and was not breathing. She was pronounced dead later of brain damage caused by methylenedioxymethamphetamine -- MDMA, or Ecstasy.
Forensic pathologist Shaun Ladham testified the drug had probably raced through her small body, shutting down her nervous system, collapsing her heart and causing brain damage.
The oldest person at the house, Rosalind Hopkins, was asked why medics were not called sooner, and she said she thought Brandy was simply drunk.
"How am I supposed to know if it's alcohol or drugs?" she said. "I'm not in the medical profession. I'm just a housewife."
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