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Lethal Cocktail: the Tragedy and the Aftermath of GHB

Originally published in The Detroit News, December, 1999
Part 2 of 2

Judi Clark, Samantha's mother, uses her daughter's death to show others the evils of GHB.

Silent now, Samantha Reid lay in a pink casket, the type usually chosen for girls who die too young.

Inside were a Girl Scout sash, her Bible, a picture of her dog Scrappy, her favorite teddy bear and a Tickle-me Cookie Monster.

Gone were the clothes of a young girl, the baggy Nike sweat shirts and glitter make-up she loved to wear. Instead, she wore a black suit and a pastel pink shirt that her mother, Judi Clark, picked out from Hudson's three days after her only daughter was fatally drugged.

Samantha was 15, an age when watching Teletubbies and seeking summer jobs seem equally appropriate. An age when there's a delicate line between what's fun and what's safe.

At the Voran Funeral Home in Taylor, Judi's crushing sobs drowned out the words of Jewel's song Hands, a song that calls for hope in seemingly desperate times.

"I won't be made useless, won't be idle with despair," Jewel sang.

In the year after the funeral, Judi, 38, has used those words to get up in the morning, to fight against the drug that killed her daughter and nearly killed her daughter's best friend, Melanie Sindone.

When Melanie, also 15, hears that song now, she sobs, sometimes for hours. The casket closed. A mother went to bury her only daughter, and a young girl went to bury her best friend.

But the drug GHB, gamma hydroxybutyrate, continues to poison Melanie as she copes with the aftermath of the night she was drugged and her best friend died.

Also poisoned are the lives of four young men accused of putting GHB into the girls' drinks. The men could spend the rest of their lives in jail if convicted of manslaughter and poisoning at their trial next month. And from big-city parties to small-town high schools, the drug continues to claim more victims.

Although GHB had been slowly creeping into Michigan for about four years, few people knew about it last January when Samantha and Melanie were hanging out with some friends on Grosse Ile.

Young adults at all-night rave parties were using it for a quick high, and body-builders were taking it to build muscle. Some men knew about it as a date-rape drug because it could be secreted into a woman's drink to render her unconscious.

But most police officers were fighting the standard drugs of choice, namely cocaine and heroin. They had started to fight trendy drugs such as Ketamine and Ecstasy, but there was little attention given to GHB, a drug feared for its unpredictability. A small dose of GHB can get someone high, but a slightly larger dose can lead to seizures, coma or death.

By January, as the drug became more mainstream, signs emerged in Michigan that authorities were dangerously unaware of the unique threats of GHB. Overdose victims were arriving at emergency rooms, but few doctors knew what GHB was or how to recognize it in a patient.

Police were pulling over seemingly drunken drivers and were confused when Breathalyzer tests showed no evidence of alcohol. The police didn't know to look for the clear, odorless substance.

Educators hadn't heard of it and thus couldn't warn their students.

Meanwhile, Web sites were popping up that told teens how to make and buy GHB, a drug promoted as natural and safe on the Internet. Underground manufacturers were mixing new proportions of chemicals and picking new product names for their latest concoction of the same dangerous drug.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned over-the-counter sales of GHB in 1990, but sellers have found ways around the ban.

Some sell ingredients or kits to make the drug. Others sell similar, but legal chemicals called GBL or BD, which convert to GHB once ingested. The products are then sold with misleading names like Renewtrient, Zen or Serenity.

"There is no drug out there as scary, except maybe heroin," said Phyllis Good, a Michigan State Police specialist. "It will continue to increase, and it's only going to get worse."

The drug is still legal in about half the states. And because the federal government has not yet declared it an illegal substance, no agency tracks its use.

But at the very least, hundreds of thousands are taking GHB, say those who study the drug.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating at least 40 suspected GHB-related deaths this year. At a minimum, 46 people have already died since 1995. About 5,500 overdose victims have gone to emergency rooms, but that doesn't include all the people who overdose but don't go to a hospital.

"What is really scary is that there are a lot more," said Trinka Porrata, a drug consultant and retired Los Angeles Police Department detective. "For every one reported, there are kazillions that aren't."

Samantha Reid, at 15, is the youngest known victim of GHB. A 77-year-old man is the oldest.

The drug has killed people in every age group and every region of the country, from North Carolina to California, Pennsylvania to Michigan. People who abuse this drug sometimes have no idea what they are dealing with. They listen to the illegal manufacturers who promote their products as herbal or nutritional supplements.

Often, the people reading the Internet hype have the same youthful innocence as Samantha and Melanie.

One victim who believed the hype was Kyle Hagmann, a freshman at California Lutheran College in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousands Oaks. On April 24, he took GHB after a classmate told him it was a safe sleep aid. Hagmann, 19, read about its safety on a Web site, three months after Samantha died. So Hagmann, an honor student, took it one night to help him fall asleep. He never woke up. He suffocated with his face in the pillow.

When Grosse Ile detectives confronted Joshua Cole, one of the suspects in the drugging of Samantha Reid, it became clear that he also didn't know he was experimenting with an unpredictable, potentially deadly substance. He told police that the GHB would just liven up the party.

Police said that Josh and the girls' two friends from high school, Daniel Brayman and Nicholas Holtschlag, both 18, went into the kitchen to get the girls' drinks. The fourth man at the party was Erick Limmer, 26, who rents the apartment where the group was hanging out.

"We were getting bored when I remembered about the drug in question," Josh wrote in a statement for police. "At that point in time, I had mentioned it to Dan and then to Nick. We all decided that if we put a little into the girls' drink, maybe they would be more talkative and it wouldn't be so quiet. When we decided to go ahead with the idea, I then took some and dropped a little in each of the girls' glasses, two Mountain Dews, one orange juice …"

Douglas Baker, the deputy chief assistant Wayne County prosecutor for major drug crimes, contends that all three teen-age men at the party knew about the GHB before giving the girls the final round of drinks. Hoping to keep themselves out of trouble, they laid the girls on the bathroom floor to let them sleep off the drug's effects instead of immediately taking them to the hospital when they began vomiting, Baker said.

"What they do is roll the dice with her life," Baker told a district judge during the four-day preliminary examination last May. "They roll the dice with her life because they're going to wait until the very last minute to see if they come out of it on their own.

"They wait and wait and wait and wait - until they're going to end up with two corpses in the apartment."

GHB leaves a notoriously difficult puzzle in its wake. Few police officers are trained to look for it.

Even more troubling, though, is that GHB leaves behind no odor and its residue is nearly untraceable. Few forensic labs even have the capacity to test for GHB.

The drug is hard to detect by law enforcement because it can mimic brash drunkenness. In Los Angeles, police stopped a man three times for drunken driving before they learned that he had not been drunk, but had been under the influence of GHB.

L.A. police stopped Scott Brockman on Aug. 17, 1996, for what they thought was drunken driving. A Breathalyzer test showed he had a blood alcohol level of 0.03, far lower than the legal limit of 0.10.

Police were confused. He had run six stop signs while driving 45 mph in a 25 mph zone. They cited him for reckless driving.

Ten days later, Brockman was again under the influence of GHB when he crashed into a car stopped at a traffic light, killing the driver. Police again were stumped by a blood-alcohol content of 0.09. A year later, when police knew what to look for and blood samples were analyzed, GHB was found.

"It is scary that he made it through the system two and a half times before the true drug issue surfaced," Porrata said.

It wouldn't take that long for police to catch on in the death of Samantha Reid.

On the night Samantha was drugged, police went to the Trenton hospital and ran into a wall of lies from teens afraid of getting in trouble. The kids at the hospital told police they had been to a party in Ecorse that they knew about from a flier.

Lt. Robert Shaw drove the boys around Ecorse, hoping they could point out the house. They never found it, and Shaw didn't believe the story.

The first break in the case came when Melanie awoke from her coma. She told police that she had been at Erick Limmer's apartment on Grosse Ile.

Police obtained a search warrant. At 5:17 a.m. Monday, five officers crashed through the door of Erick's apartment. The girls' shoes were still outside the door.

Police seized 12 Budweiser beer bottles, a dozen glasses from the kitchen sink and counter, Mountain Dew and Coke bottles, Absolut vodka, Sunny Delight, Sour Apple Pucker Schnapps and butts from two marijuana cigarettes in the trash can.

Suspecting GHB, police sent the bottles and glasses, as well vials of blood and urine from Samantha and Melanie, to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Chicago. Officials then sent the evidence to its Cincinnati lab to be tested.

There is no lab in Michigan that has the capacity to test for GHB, although the drug has been illegal in the state since July 1998.

Lab analysis returned nearly two months later showed that three glasses and seven beer bottles contained residue of GHB or a close chemical cousin, GBL.

The blood tests also showed that Samantha Reid and Melanie Sindone had been given more than twice the amount of GHB needed to kill them.

The four men now face charges of manslaughter and two counts of poisoning, which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison. They all pleaded not guilty. Their trials begin Jan. 31. It will be a precedent-setting case, the first prosecution for GHB-related homicide in the nation, Baker said.

John Gates, a Royal Oak attorney representing Daniel Brayman, said his client was unaware of the GHB.

Cecil St. Pierre, an attorney for Erick Limmer, said his client did not participate in putting GHB in the girls' final, deadly round of drinks. The charges against him had been dropped earlier this year, but they were reinstated by a Wayne Circuit Court judge. His attorney is appealing that decision.

The other defense attorneys declined to comment.

Melanie Sindone lives daily with what she remembers from that night and what she painfully can't remember.

She shies away from talking about the January night to her friends and family, in part because she gets upset when she can't remember details. She has difficulty listening to her mother or Samantha's mother, Judi Clark, talk about being in the hospital, watching the two girls in comas.

Exactly six months after Samantha died, Judi told Melanie and some of her friends that she found herself strong enough to stop at Oakwood Hospital-Seaway Center in Trenton. She wanted to see the nurse who took care of Samantha, she told a group of Samantha's friends.

"I thanked him for making Samantha as comfortable as he could," Judi told the girls. "He started crying. He said it changed him forever. He's still crying, just like the rest of us."

Judi looked over at Melanie, whose face was tucked down. She saw that tears were falling to the floor.

Melanie tried to speak, but was inaudible through her tear-choked voice. She ran from the room and her friends fell silent. They could hear her throwing up in the bathroom.

Melanie sat on the bathroom floor for a half hour, just above Samantha's basement bedroom. The bedroom was where the two girls spent hours talking, laughing and sharing their feelings.

It was their sanctuary from adults.

Just a few days before Samantha died, Melanie wrote her a letter in permanent marker on her bedroom wall.

Sam - Hey girl, what's up? You are my best friend in the whole wide world. I love you man. Promise me we will never fight and if we do, you gotta apologize. Just joking. I can tell you anything and you always understand. You are my girl. Always and forever, Melanie

Upstairs, Melanie's sister Anita tried to comfort her.

But there was only so much she could say. When Melanie was drugged, she lost the childhood innocence that made her feel invincible and allowed her world to expand.

Melanie continued to throw up.

After Samantha died, Judi tried to preserve all that she could of her daughter's life. For nine months, she left Samantha's room exactly as the 15-year-old girl had left it when she was fretting about what to wear before running out the door to see a movie with her best friend.

The clothes Samantha decided not to wear her last night remained scattered on the floor. Her make-up was still spread out, crumbs of eye shadow speckled on the vanity.

Judi refused to dust.

For a long time, Judi couldn't even sleep in the house, let alone enter Samantha's bedroom. But as months passed, she found herself wandering into her daughter's bedroom. Soon, it became her sanctuary.

It was where she could be alone with her thoughts of Samantha and read her daughter's writings on the wall.

She looks at the names of Samantha's friends that cover the wall. "Melanie + Sam. B.F.F." is written in blue marker on the vanity mirror.

Some names are crossed out, too, generally the names of ex-boyfriends. Even in the scribble, Judi can pick out two names from the wall that she had planned to paint.

The names Dan and Nick are etched on the wall in black marker.

They were crossed out after Samantha died.

Night after night, Nancy Sindone sees faceless boys when she closes her eyes to go to sleep.

In one dream, they are lurking around a family gathering, putting something into glasses of vodka and handing them to her family. She chases the boys but is awakened by her own voice screaming out loud for them to stop.

It has been 10 months since her daughter was drugged with GHB, but the nightmares are getting more vivid than ever.

Melanie has nightmares, too, but doesn't want to talk about them. The nightmares Melanie will talk about are played out during the day, especially at school.

After the drugging, Melanie missed about six weeks of classes at Carlson High School. She first went back to school about a month after Samantha died, but stayed home for two weeks after that because she said it was too difficult to be there.

During that time, Melanie sheltered herself in her bedroom, rarely even leaving to go downstairs. She listened to music, rearranged her room, painted her nails, talked to her sisters and rearranged her room again. One day, she was bored and picked up the phone to call Samantha. She started dialing before realizing that Samantha wouldn't be there.

"I definitely need her," Melanie said.

Back at school, Melanie cried when she saw Samantha's empty seat in their math and science classes. She grew sad when she went to locker No. 1175, which Melanie and Samantha had shared.

And in the hallways, she was self-conscious about what classmates might be saying about her.

"It felt like everybody's eyeballs were glued to me," Melanie said. "I didn't know if they were talking about me, but it felt like they were."

Melanie changed schools this year. After school now, she goes home and back to the memories of Samantha. She looks at the collage of pictures of Samantha in her room. She looks at the teddy bears she received during a somber 15th birthday party thrown for her while she was still in the hospital, just two days after her best friend died.

She reads the poem Samantha wrote to her last December, titled "For My Best Friend."

In that poem, Samantha wrote: "You taught me that I'm worth much more, Than what I'd always thought/You gave me strength and confidence, For that I owe a lot."

Recently, Melanie looked at the plastic bag of clothes in her living room. They're the clothes that she wore the last night she hung out with Samantha, recently picked up from the emergency room. There are jeans, her favorite green T-shirt, socks and a ponytail holder.

"I haven't wanted to look at them," Melanie said, peering closer at the bag to see what was inside. "Hey, that's Sammy's belt."

Judi's not quite sure why she called the Gibraltar Police Department. Maybe she wanted to see if her daughter's death had made an impact.

"Could you tell me what GHB is?" she asked the dispatcher who picked up the phone.

"I'm really not too sure. Wait, I think we have some pamphlets on it. Let me check," the dispatcher said, returning to the phone a few seconds later. "The pamphlets are all gone. Sorry."

That was when Judi decided she would start a crusade against GHB. She would begin in Michigan and then eventually go nationwide, telling as many people as possible that GHB can take their children's lives as easily as it took Samantha's.

That was about five months after her daughter's death. During those long months, she stayed home from work. She passed the time by planting a garden with more than 25 types of fruits and vegetables.

She went back to work as a pipe fitter in July, about the same time she read all the GHB literature she could find. She started the Samantha Reid Foundation with some relatives and about 10 of Samantha's friends.

The group plans to get non-profit status so it can raise money for anti-GHB awareness.

Judi already is responsible for the anti-GHB billboard at the Flat Rock Speedway and has passed out hundreds of GHB pamphlets at art fairs, seminars and union picnics. She cringes when she thinks that students are still not learning about GHB in school.

She has changed a lot in the past 10 months. It took almost eight weeks before she was brave enough to sleep at her empty home. It took two months before she went grocery shopping, previously a mother-daughter activity.

Now, she gets counseling and attends meetings of the support group, Parents of Murdered Children.

The Samantha Reid Foundation gives her hope that some meaning can come to this meaningless death. But while she acts strong and courageous during foundation meetings and at seminars, she quietly retreats into her memories of Samantha for most of the day.

One day, she went through the purse Samantha took with her that January night. She found strawberry and champagne lotion from Victoria's Secret, make-up, Teen Midol, deodorant, gum, house keys and a hair brush.

Judi stared at the brush for a while and retreated inward to that mother whose daughter had just died, a time when fighting GHB was a distant thought.

"That's all I have of her hair," she said, stroking the wisps left tangled in the brush. "I really wish I would have taken like a locket of her hair. But you don't think about them things until they're gone, y'know?"

If you listen closely in the Blue Ridge section of Michigan Memorial Park in Flat Rock, you can hear where Samantha lies.

A breeze blows through the skinny red maple by Samantha's grave, swaying the wind chimes that play like a music box over a baby's crib at night. Three women walk slowly up the slight hill to a spot where the grass is brighter than the rest.

Judi walks toward the plaque marking her daughter's grave. There is still no tombstone because she can't decide what to put on it. She thinks about her quiet house, one without dirty towels on the floor, missing remote controls and empty hair spray bottles.

Nancy Sindone looks toward Melanie and wonders whether she's becoming overprotective, worrying every time her daughter leaves the house.

Melanie looks at the purple cross she left at the cemetery. She talks about how she hates school, how she can't trust people. She's getting stronger and can talk about Samantha without crying. But she worries about the upcoming trial and again facing her former classmates from the witness stand.

Dan and Nick were kicked out of high school their senior year, a few months before the senior prom and graduation. Erick was engaged to be married when he was charged with manslaughter. Josh has nightmares about the trial and smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, his grandmother said.

At Michigan Memorial Park, two mothers and a scared, insecure young woman talk silently to Samantha, then begin to walk back to their cars, stopping at the red maple tree.

"It's too quiet out here," Judi says as she untwists some of the wind chimes on the tree. "Sam liked the noise."

Melanie corrects her: "Sam was the noise."

But Judi insists that Samantha still is the noise.

Inflaming her passion to warn the world about GHB, Judi recalls one of Samantha's poems:

For I shall not go quietly into the night; I shall succeed and no battle will be won until I have had my fight. Harsh hammers and evil enemies look out, I am on my way.

NATION WILL WATCH LOCAL GHB CASE

Unprecedented Trial Will Help Shape Future Prosecutions

DETROIT — About a year after Samantha Reid drank a lethal dose of GHB, four men face the possibility of life in prison for her death.

It will be the first prosecution in the nation's history for a GHB-related homicide, said Douglas Baker, deputy chief assistant Wayne County prosecutor for major drug crimes. The case will be watched by authorities as they decide whether to prosecute people who have given or sold GHB to victims. The men charged with manslaughter and two counts of poisoning are: Erick Limmer, 26, of Grosse Ile; Joshua Cole, 19, of Southgate; Daniel Brayman, 18, of Trenton; and Nicholas Holtschlag, 18, of Brownstown Township.

The men are accused of poisoning Samantha Reid and her best friend, Melanie Sindone, with GHB when the group was hanging out at Limmer's apartment. The poisoning charge carries a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison.

The case against Cole will be heard by a separate jury. He told police that he put GHB in the girls' drinks, but that Brayman and Holtschlag knew about the plan.

The trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 31.

A MOVE TO BAN GHB

The U.S. House and Senate recently passed legislation that would outlaw GHB. The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, and U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham, awaits approval from President Clinton. The Samantha Reid and Hillory J. Farias Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act of 1999 does the following:

Copyright © 1999 The Detroit News.

Lethal Cocktail: the Tragedy and the Aftermath of GHB - Part 1