More on the Issue of Mark’s Blood Alcohol Level

This post raises questions about the blood alcohol level that authorities emphasized as a primary factor in my brother Mark’s death.  According to New York State Police investigators, because he was said to have had an extremely high blood alcohol level, Mark caused the fire that claimed his life by spilling gasoline inside his truck, either accidentally or deliberately, and then lighting a cigarette.

Two previous posts (September 1 and October 29, 2013) have discussed problems with the N.Y. State Police theory about how Mark’s truck came to be fifty feet into the field across from his house the night of the fire.  Tire tracks observed by emergency workers on the scene indicated that the truck went down the long driveway in a straight line and then into the field across the road.  The State Police insisted that Mark could have backed his truck straight down that driveway and fifty feet into the field even with an approximately .46 blood alcohol level (calculated from a .25 post-mortem serum alcohol level).

However, the police record for his DWI the day before contradicts that assumption.  According to the DWI report, Mark, with a .28 blood alcohol level, was “weaving back and forth in [the] lane” and “failed to keep right.”  With any higher blood alcohol level, then, he would at least have been weaving back and forth; with a .46, he could not possibly have driven the truck in a straight line.  In fact, if he really had a .46 blood alcohol level, my brother would almost certainly have been in a coma, if not actually dead.  Moreover, he had head wounds, including evidence of a blow to his forehead (see esp. post of January 29, 2019), that would have made driving his truck to any extent whatsoever virtually impossible.  Someone else had to have backed that truck into the field.

Mark’s attending physician at the burn unit insisted to me that the .25 post-mortem serum alcohol level recorded in the autopsy report (=.46 blood alcohol level at the time of the truck fire) had to be wrong.  A forensic toxicologist whom I consulted agreed with Mark’s attending physician that the .25 post-mortem serum alcohol level was hard to believe and outlined the scientific bases for that conclusion (see post of September 1, 2013).  He also added that lab technicians frequently make mistakes in recording blood alcohol levels, often reversing digits.  (There was an obvious sloppy mistake in the autopsy report, which records Mark’s height as 5 ft. 7 ½ in. instead of 5 ft. 11 ½ in.)   Furthermore, as previously mentioned (see esp. post of August 11, 2014), an anonymous letter sent to me revealed that shortly before the fire Mark had been at the house of a neighbor, who insisted that he could not have been so intoxicated as the authorities claimed.

It is also relevant that Mark’s wife Susan says in her witness statement that shortly before the fire she heard “a noise” in the garage that she thought was from the cats but later realized that Mark had taken a gas can out of the garage (see the police report by the link on the side of the blog).  It is difficult to understand how Mark’s wife could have known about the gas can right after the fire (see post of September 29, 2018).  But the State Police investigators clearly did not pursue the implications of those comments, which Susan made the night of the fire. 

If Mark had a .46 blood alcohol level, it seems impossible that he could have gone through the garage door by the side of the house (see photos by the link on the side of the blog) and walked through that space without stumbling and bumping into objects, making a lot of noise in the process.  As the arrest report for his DWI the day before indicates, Mark with a .28 blood alcohol level exhibited poor motor control and failed a variety of sobriety field tests, including “walk and turn,” “one leg stand,” and “finger to nose.”  Thus, if he was even more intoxicated the night of the fire, his wife would presumably have checked to see what was going on and would have reported much more than hearing a simple noise in the garage.

The New York State Police investigators, of course, knew about Mark’s DWI the day before the fire.  They were also aware of the highly problematic circumstances leading up to that DWI (see esp. posts of April 18, 2013, September 14, 2014, and June 21, 2016).  In particular, after being involved in a personal argument with my brother at a local club, off-duty police officer Mark Marowski called in to the Salamanca police to pick Mark up for DWI on his way home.  Marowski and my brother had reportedly got into arguments at that club on multiple occasions.  It was also well known that Marowski had serious problems with both drugs and alcohol (and, ironically, was later picked up for DWI himself).

It is troubling that apparently nothing was done to investigate Marowski himself for possible involvement in the events that ended in the suspicious truck fire that took my brother’s life.  The claim of an affair between Marowski and Mark’s wife (see post of August 11, 2014) makes that failure seem all the more like an example of police protecting other police.  Who else might the police have been protecting?