Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The Problem of Toxic Substances Revisited


This post concerns the disturbing issue of toxic levels of an ingested substance in the post-mortem medical findings for both my brother Mark and Dale Tarapacki.

As reported in previous posts (see esp. September 1, September 23, and October 29, 2013), my brother’s autopsy report records a post-mortem .25 serum alcohol level: that post-mortem reading means that Mark would have had a blood alcohol level of approximately .46 at the time of his truck fire.  That extraordinarily high blood alcohol level has always seemed impossible for the following reasons:

(1) My brother would almost certainly have been in a coma, if not actually dead, from that level of alcohol before the truck fire ever occurred (see post of September 1, 2013).

(2) Then Erie County Medical Examiner Sung-ook Baik, according to Atty. Michael Kelly who expressed his concerns about this issue, agreed that the post-mortem reading seemed too high, though he accepted what the lab technicians had given him (see post of September 1, 2013).

(3) It would also have been completely out of character for my brother to risk another DWI, after being arrested for DWI following a personal argument with off-duty policeman Mark Marowski the day before his truck fire.  In fact, Mark had told two different friends shortly after his arrest for DWI that he would be careful, since he needed to drive to his job as a security guard (see post of September 23, 2013).

(4) Most tellingly, the writer of the anonymous letter sent to me (see post of August 11, 2014) stated emphatically that Mark had been at a neighbor’s house right before his truck fire and that this neighbor insisted that my brother could not possibly have had a blood alcohol level of .25 (much less .46!).  Unfortunately, neither the writer of the anonymous letter nor the neighbor whom Mark visited just before the fire has come forward.

According to an addendum in Dale Tarapacki’s death certificate, Tarapacki died as a result of “acute alprazolam intoxication complicated by inhalation of products of combustion and thermal injury.”  A previous post (May 19, 2016) brought up the cause of death in order to raise a problem about the explanation for the truck fire in the fire investigator’s report: it is difficult to comprehend how 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”).

However, a reliable source recently informed me that a police search of Tarapacki’s house did not turn up any prescription drugs such as alprazolam.  That lack raises a serious question: if an individual was taking a drug like alprazolam at such a high level, wouldn’t there be some evidence of that substance at the person’s residence?