A previous post (June 5, 2022) discussed the dubiousness of suicide as a presumed motivation that led to the supposed accident resulting in pharmacist Dale Tarapacki’s death in a suspicious truck fire in rural Great Valley, New York, in April 2005. This post discusses another assumption by the police investigation about Tarapacki’s role in his own death.
As that previous post mentions, the entry for June 22, 2005, in the report of the investigation into Tarapacki’s death by the Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s office states that “i[t] has been ruled that the victim died as a result of acute alprazolam intoxication complicated by inhalation of products of combustion and thermal injury.” An entry in the police report for April 12, 2005, referencing the medical examiner’s findings in the autopsy, states that there did not appear to be soot in Tarapacki’s lungs, which suggested to the M.E. that he had died before the fire, and that the esophagus was “borderline with signs of soot.”
The police report does not indicate if the medical examiner found some indication of soot in Tarapacki’s lungs at a later date, but Tarapacki presumably must have been near death when the fire started. The fact that Tarapacki’s body was burned beyond recognition, as stated in the police report, reinforces the likelihood that he was near death when the fire started. Tarapacki obviously had no chance to get out of the truck in an effort to save himself.
In light of the facts about the condition of Tarapacki’s body, it is difficult to understand the explanation in the fire investigator’s report of Tarapacki’s role in the origin of the fire. The fire investigator’s report hypothesizes that the drive shaft broke and caused fuel to leak onto the catalytic converter, where it ignited (on problems with that theory, see post of March 19, 2016). The fire investigator’s report further suggests that Tarapacki caused more damage to the truck when he (presumably persistently) tried to move the truck, putting the front drive shaft under extreme RPM’s, which made the wheel bearings of the front passenger’s wheel blow out, and the fuel pump then sprayed fuel on the driver’s side, which ignited the rest of the truck.
As the scientific literature on alprazolam indicates, the effects of extreme alprazolam toxicity range from excessive drowsiness to coma. Since alprazolam poisoning is stated as the primary cause of his death, Tarapacki presumably had a high level of toxicity. How could he have exerted himself to continue to try and get his truck off the side of that remote road, where it was so oddly found?
