Thursday, May 19, 2016

A Follow-up on a FOIL Request for Records on the Death of Dale Tarapacki

A previous post (March 19, 2016) reported on the inadequate response by Cattaraugus County to my FOIL request for records on the death of Dale Tarapacki.  As a number of individuals in the Salamanca area informed me, Mr. Tarapacki was one of two others who also died under suspicious circumstances in Great Valley, New York, within a year or so after my brother Mark was found engulfed in flames in the field across from his house in rural Great Valley.  His burning pickup truck was located about 60 feet away, with a gas can on the floor of the passenger's side--a very suspicious detail since my brother never put gas cans in the cab of his truck.  Dale Tarapacki also died as a result of a suspicious truck fire.  In his case, the official explanation for the truck fire, according to the fire investigator's report, appeared difficult to grasp even for an experienced mechanic, as the post of March 19 details.

Although my FOIL request for the official records related to Dale Tarapacki's death resulted in my receiving only the fire investigator's report, subsequently a private individual gave me access to his death certificate.  This post raises concerns about the combination of factors that the death certificate mentions as leading to Tarapacki's death.  Those factors include the truck fire itself.  According to an addendum (“corrected 7-1-05”), Tarapacki died as a result of “acute alprazolam intoxication complicated by inhalation of products of combustion and thermal injury.”  My intention here is not to challenge the medical explanation per se but rather to question how it happened that Tarapacki himself caused the truck fire and remained in the truck long enough to inhale the deadly smoke of the fire (“products of combustion”) and suffer fatal burns (“thermal injury”).

Alprazolam, a drug classified as a benzodiazepine and commonly prescribed under the brand name of Xanax, is used to treat anxiety and depression.  Someone who knew him well said that around the time of his death Tarapacki was feeling some anxiety, and according to widely known published information, the effects of excessive amounts of alprazolam can include drowsiness, confusion, and muscle weakness, among other symptoms.  But Tarapacki was a pharmacist, who would have known how much of that drug—or any other drug—would be dangerous to ingest.  He certainly would not have wanted to take his own life--or to risk it--under the particular circumstances in which he actually died.  Another friend of his who was suspicious of the truck fire reported that Tarapacki as a pharmacist had mentioned in conversation that there are peaceful ways to die.  His own manner of death was anything but “peaceful.”

Even if somehow he did carelessly overdose on alprazolam and suffer the likely symptoms, it is then difficult to grasp how he kept trying to accelerate the truck after it became stuck on remote Hardscrabble Road.  As the fire investigator's report suggests, Tarapacki had been alert enough to continue to accelerate in an aggressive manner, to no effect; he thus reportedly caused the wheels to spin excessively after the rear drive shaft broke and punctured the fuel line.  (See post of March 16, with a copy of the fire investigator's report: "The wheel bearings of the front passenger wheel were blown out of the housing as a result of the front drive shaft being engaged and under extreme RPM's during attempts by the driver to move the vehicle.")

The official explanation for Tarapacki's death seems, then, to raise more questions than it answers.