The Occurrence: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Grief, Survival, and For God's Sake Don't Let This Happen to You

One

Until a day is over, there’s always a chance you’ll remember it for something else.

Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore) in This is Us, Season 6, Episode 3, teleplay by Dan Fogelman,  Casey Johnson, and David Windsor

So it seems that this is the book I was meant to write.  And it all started on the worst day of my life.  (So far. %-)

I’ve always wanted to write, but never had the discipline.  I can’t sustain a gym membership either, and there are similarities.  When I come back from the gym, I always feel virtuous, more healthy both physically and emotionally, and I feel the same way after a session of writing.  And yet, when it is next time to go to the gym or to sit down and write, I feel the same inner resistance.  I want to have done it, but I don’t want to do it.

I’m told that I write wonderful letters, and a friend of mine tells me that she has saved all of my correspondence.  But no one writes letters anymore.  First we were reduced to email and then Twitter, now Snapchat.  I expect The Collected Snapchats of Pope Francis to be published in 2039.

I used to write a humorous newsletter at the off-Broadway theater where I worked, purely for the amusement of my co-workers.  Our Musical Theater Program Director, Ira Weitzman, tells me that he saved every number of these staff meeting minutes.  But I recently reread one of them, and I couldn’t remember half of the references to people or to incidents that had happened so long ago.  I suppose – I hope – that they were funny at the time, but they have no shelf life.  You really did have to be there.

The only remark that still made me laugh, more than 30 years on, was not mine.  I simply transcribed something our Literary Manager, Eric Overmyer, said at one of our staff meetings.

Eric was charged with reading and evaluating both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful playwrights, with an eye toward possible production in one of our two performance spaces.  And although this was the mission of our theater, both Eric and his responsibilities remained mysterious to the rest of us.  We bustled about on the second floor of the crumbling old building on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues in Manhattan, a former burlesque house back in the days when New York was more dangerous and interesting and less sanitized, back when Times Square was teeming with cars and trucks and hookers and pimps and arcades and triple-X porn movies instead of over-priced half-price theater tickets and fat tourists sweating and collapsed into wrought-iron patio furniture.

Those of us who worked on the second floor were in marketing, business, fundraising, box office, casting, production -- occupations we all pretty much understood, at least vaguely.  On the first floor was our main theater space and lobby, which were self-explanatory.  The sight of lights and sets and costumes, the smell of sawdust and make-up and dusty velvet upholstery and then, on performance nights the rising buzz in the lobby as guests greeted friends, the intoxicating aroma of mingled perfumes, and then the mad rush and flutter of closing chatter in the audience as the house lights dimmed.  This was the mission, the goal, the dream, the reason we were all here.

But Eric lived in a strange netherworld, a cramped little office down a flight of dark steps at the back of the building, off the business office.  At the bottom of the steps was a long, dark hallway lined floor to ceiling on both sides with brown cardboard boxes containing all of the archives of Playwrights Horizons: manuscripts, playbills, posters, photographs, correspondence, the yellowing parchment record of decades of artistry and creativity.  A perilous life-threatening hazard inexplicably never flagged by the fire marshals.

At the end of this hallway was a small, cramped room set like a crow’s nest over the building’s front door, redeemed by the light from a wide floor to ceiling arched window that faced out onto 42nd Street.  Here Eric and his intern sat, knees to knees, surrounded by towers of play scripts, and they read plays all day, occasionally remarking to one another on some brilliant or dreadful bit of writing they had come across, or sitting up straight for a moment to stretch, crack their necks from side to side, and passively regard the carnival of 42nd Street passing by.

Eric’s job was to go back to before the beginning, before the necessity for fundraising and marketing and casting.  He held in his hands every day the tear- and coffee-ringed products of hours and days and weeks and months and sometimes years of solitary, soul-grinding labor and hope on the part of would-be playwrights from all across the country and around the world.  Every once in a while he would emerge from his lair to head for the bathroom or to engage in some other mysterious errand above ground, and his posture reflected both his habitual environment and his working life.  He was pale, blond, shaggy-haired, and bespectacled, somewhat hunched over at the neck and shoulders, his posture permanently altered by a career spent looking down at the words that had somehow found their way into his lap.

People often ask me what I do, Eric said with an exhausted sigh at one of our weekly staff meetings.  Well.  Today, for example, I’m reading a play entitled ‘Electra-cution, or: You’re Under Orestes.’  He paused, sighed again, and gazed balefully around the circle at the rest of us.  And that’s what I do.

This struck me as hilarious at the time, and it still does, both the play’s painfully punny title and Eric’s resigned reaction to it.  But, seriously, why has this play not been produced?  I would totally go.  You’re Under Orestes.  That just kills me.

Mostly because I worked at a theater and was steeped in it, I wrote a play called Knights of Doubt.  I took the title from a poem, a hymn, by an obscure Danish poet (is there any other kind?) named Bernhard Severin Ingemann that begins as follows:

Through the night of doubt and sorrow

                  onward goes the pilgrim band,

                  singing songs of expectation,

                  marching to the promised land.

I was trying to channel Chekhov in The Three Sisters and Lanford Wilson in Fifth of July, so my play conjured up an apt description I once read about New Yorker short stories.  To paraphrase: "Nothing much really happens… but you feel sort of sad about it anyway."

Alas, Knights of Doubt wasn’t good enough to be worthy of production, and not bad enough to be interesting.  I received a pity reading at Playwrights Horizons, thanks to the generosity of my former boss, the Artistic Director André Bishop, and I cast it with my friends, wonderful actors all.  It passed unremarked into obscurity, and rightly so.  I’m not a dramatist.  Drama doesn’t just imply drama; it states it right out loud.  It’s called Drama.  And for someone like me, who is conflict-averse, drama is a tough haul.  So my play consisted of a lot of smart people sitting around talking.  Smartly.  Which might be amusing, but will never be riveting, or life-changing, like the best theater.

I love to read, more than just about anything in the world.  To read is to enter the mind of another, to live another life.  There are probably a lot of people, like me, who may think they want to write, because they love to read.  It’s hard to make a living just reading, so what’s the next best alternative?  Writing.

I actually did read for a living at one brief point in my life.  I read books and scripts for MGM, was what they called a D-girl in the movie business, for Development Girl.  These are people – mostly women, at least traditionally – who read through a slush pile of books or screenplays looking for something bankable, although no property has ever been produced from a work read by a D-Girl.  Never.  Not one thing.  The D should stand for Dead End.  It’s the perfect pointless job.

And it’s a miserable job.  Yes, you get to read, but you cannot choose what you read, and then you must write up a summary and recommendation afterwards.  As I recall, I was paid $50.00 for every property read which, if you do the math on a typical script or book, plus the writing of the summary and recommendation for further action (i.e., none), comes out to probably $5.00 an hour, max, without benefits.

And any time you’re not reading, you’re not making money.  So it became impossible for me, during this period of my life, to enjoy a brunch or drink with friends because during times that should have been pleasant, making memories in my youth, I would be thinking, I could be reading some dreadful science fiction story this moment about the planet Meepzor, thereby paying my rent and for this brunch and this drink.  I was miserable.

So I suppose I’ve always wanted to write, in a desultory sort of way, or just "to be a writer."  But I don’t know that I have the disposition, the stamina, the attention span, (or the talent) for it.

Still, I’m going to write this, because maybe I can help someone.  Maybe I can even help you, or someone you love.  I hope so.

It started around 6:00 a.m. on the morning of February 9, 2018 when my husband and I received probably the second worst phone call a parent can receive.  Or maybe the third worst.  Or maybe fourth or fifth.  I don’t know.  There are a lot of terrible phone calls out there, as it turns out, and I’ve become much more sensitive to them after what happened to us.  We spend our lives dreading and anticipating those phone calls so that when one comes, we’re almost relieved, or at least vindicated.  Ah, here it is, at last, as I always knew it would be.

The day before had been ordinary and uneventful, forgettable, as all the best days are.  The only notable news: the Dow plunged over 1,000 points to close below 24,000 for the first time since the previous November, Bermuda rolled back gay marriage legalization to domestic partnership, and curling kicked off the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

But then everything changed in less than a second.

If my co-workers and all but my closest friends and family were to find out what I’m going through right now, have been going through now for years, they would be shocked that I can continue working and living and breathing and laughing every day.  What happened was horrible, and continues to be horrible, and will always be horrible, but I’ve learned that people are carrying around a lot of burdens you would never guess about.  I know I am.

I’ve also discovered that a traumatic event changes not only the present and the future, it changes the past as well.  A dark curtain has fallen over my family’s life, and life’s entire meaning has been altered, as has the meaning of the lives of everyone who came before me: my parents, my grandparents, and ancestors unknown.

It takes only one error in judgment, one moment, less time than it takes to draw a breath.  I can’t go back in time to change the past, but I hope that I can prevent one person from making the same tragic mistake.  To prevent the end of a life.  To prevent the death of a life.

Because there is more than one kind of death.  The people we were before – myself, my husband, my daughter – those people are all gone, as surely as if our ashes had been scattered into the sea.  I look now at pictures of us – posing together for a 5th grade school picture, sitting on the grass up at Brinkie’s Brae in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, on the beach in the Dominican Republic – and they might as well be sepia-toned, so remote are those images from the life we live now, and what the future holds for us.  Those people are lost to us forever.  I still remember them, but only just, because memory fades.

We can never return to the time before that phone call.  All we can do, with whatever time is left to us, is try to move on from here, to find purpose and meaning in what remains.

… in a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning….

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up

When it happened, I thought that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone.  But that idea barely stood up to scrutiny for even a moment.  Because then, just five days later, three adults and 14 children were slaughtered at the Margery Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  Since then there have been hurricanes and flooding.  Twenty people were killed in a wedding limousine crash in upstate New York, including four sisters and two pedestrians.  Eleven people were killed in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  The opioid crisis kills over a hundred Americans every single day.  Nine children died of adenovirus at a Haskell, New Jersey nursing facility.  There’s the war in Yemen.  North Korea.  St. Jude Children’s Hospital, drownings, bicycle accidents, falls from ladders.  The bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house.

Turns out there’s a lot of misery in the world.  That’s why, if you tossed your troubles onto the table with everyone else’s, dreadful as they are, you’d probably end up clawing yours back, embracing them.

In my own life, I’ve seen and heard of a lot of suffering.

I worked briefly as personal assistant to the actress Dina Merrill.  It would be hard to find a person who might inspire more envy than Dina.  She was beautiful, gracious, and impossibly wealthy.  Her parents were Marjorie Merriweather Post (Post cereals) and Edward Francis Hutton (E.F. Hutton; when he talked, people listened).  She was married to the heir to the Colgate-Palmolive empire, and then to movie star Cliff Robertson.  At one point, her net worth was estimated to be $5 billion.

She also buried two of her four children: David, who died in a boating accident at 24, and Heather, who died of cancer at 38.  Would you take Dina’s fortune, along with her troubles, or would you keep your own?  Keep your debts and keep your children.

I recently learned that an old college friend lost her young adult son to a sudden, mysterious virus.  Another dear college friend shot herself in the head in the woods behind a motel in Virginia.

I worked at Playwrights Horizons with a woman called Stefanie Verkauf, who was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known.  She loved Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne.  When tabloid reports of domestic abuse allegations came out regarding Browne and his then girlfriend, the actress Daryl Hannah, I asked Stefanie what she thought of him now.  She sighed wistfully and said, "Oh, if only he cared enough about me to beat me up."

Domestic abuse is a serious problem, but still.  That is some serious funny.

Stefanie died of a brain tumor at 43, leaving behind a husband, and three children under the age of 10.

I worked with a 3rd grader who suddenly started stumbling and weaving through the school hallways like a drunk.  He had a brainstem tumor, and was dead within six months.

So, as it turns out, I had led a rather charmed life up to that moment in 2018.

I came home from work on February 8 and told my husband about a youtube video I had watched at lunchtime featuring Dr. Jordan Peterson, he of the 12 Rules for Life.  Dr. Peterson was shown polling one of his psychology lecture classes, asking them to raise their hands if they had never in their lives experienced a two-week period of sustained and serious pain, suffering, and depression.  Only one lone person in the back raised her hand.  Dr. Peterson seemed momentarily taken aback.  His eyebrows shot up.  Oh!  Good for you! he said after a moment.  And then, more ruefully, shaking his head, It’s coming.

And about twelve hours later, it came for us.

It is fate, destiny, nemesis.  Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin.  Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter.  Every life has such a moment.  What distinguishes us is whether – and how – we ever come back.

Charles Krauthammer

When I say that a traumatic event not only changes the present and the future, but also changes the past, I mean that a trauma becomes the beginning of a new normal, but it also becomes the final event, the destination, the meaning of everything that came before, as though it were inevitable.  This turns out to be where we were heading all along.  All of my memories, especially the happy ones, are now colored by this event, as though my entire life was just marking time to this moment.  I can never look back without thinking of this, or look forward, or even live in the present.  This single event inhabits me as I inhabit it, and always will.

In her magnificent book The Proud Tower, about the late 19th and early 20th century years in Europe, the years leading up to 1914, the brilliant historian Barbara Tuchman describes the First World War as …[lying] like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours…. [creating] a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.

Individuals and families can have their own bands of scorched earth.

I like to get up early, at least two hours before I leave for work.  My husband Philip and daughter Andrea need to eat as soon as their feet touch the floor, but I must ease into it.  Coffee.  Coffee is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  I pet one of our two lap cats, Betty and Wilma, watch a little television news, work on my Duolingo Spanish app.

I read somewhere a long time ago that something absurd like 75% of Americans eat at least one meal a day in their cars, which explains why, when someone offers you a ride, they have to apologize while they clear out what looks like the contents of a McDonald’s dumpster from the passenger side, throwing everything into the back, on top of another dumpster’s worth of debris, creating sedimentary layers of wrappers, bags, plastic cutlery, and napkins to be explored and puzzled over by archaeologists centuries from now.

Not me.  I like to take my time and eat at home.

So I was sitting in the Queen Anne chair in the living room with Wilma in my lap when Philip came down the stairs looking pensively at his phone.  Cole just called, he said.  Cole was Andrea’s housemate, a nice kid, some kind of tech wizard entrepreneur.  Very Aspergersy.  Apparently, our daughter was arrested this morning at 3 a.m. for a DUI.

I couldn’t even get upset, which is a sign of growth for me, a chronic worrier.  In a way, it was inevitable.  She lives in Austin, Texas, where everybody is young, everybody loves music, and everybody is drinking.  The columnist Kevin D. Williamson has described Austin as a place where the average drinker drinks more than average.  Andrea had been 21 for almost 10 months, so was relatively new to legal drinking.  Did she drink before she was 21?  Yes, like most young people, I fear.  But then she would call us, as we had urged her to.

Mom?  Remember when you said that if I ever needed a ride home I could just call you and you would…?

Yes, I interrupted her.  Where are you?  And so we went and got her.  No questions asked, no recriminations, just advice to not do it again.  It happened only once that I know of when she was still in high school.

But were there times when she didn’t call?  Almost certainly.

Our old friend Ben was also our family lawyer, based in Dallas.  He had drawn up our wills, living trust, end of life advanced directives.  And since he was only about three hours north of her, he had told Andrea, If you ever need anything, if you get picked up for a DUI…  So I guess even Ben was expecting it, even if we weren’t.  The DUI is the common cold of Austin, Texas.

We hadn’t seen Andrea since Thanksgiving, which we spent with her in Austin.  She was supposed to come home for Christmas, but her pug Giacomo, the love of her life, suffered a mysterious anaphylactic reaction to something, we know not what, around the middle of December, and she didn’t want to leave him in care.  We couldn’t stay in the second bedroom of the house because Cole lived there now, and Andrea had been working for four months at the front desk of the Westin Austin Downtown, so she would be busy during the holidays anyway.

Andrea and I had spent a couple of weeks in August 2017 walking into the top hotels in downtown Austin, trying to find her a job.  Andrea looks like my mother-in-law, who was quite beautiful, and she is smart, funny, and articulate.  Rather than applying for jobs the way young people do nowadays, by uploading a resume and simply hitting Send, I suggested that she walk in, resume in hand, and ask to see the manager.  And it worked.  Andrea is the person you want to see at the front desk when you finally arrive at your hotel on your thirty-seventh business trip of the year, or when you show up for your best friend’s destination bachelor party.

Is she okay? I asked Philip.

Yes, apparently, but Cole says it sounds as though someone got hurt.

At 3 a.m. on a Friday morning in Austin?

She must have rear-ended someone, I said.  We all know about the hazards of drinking before driving and texting while driving, which some say is even worse, but one of my student’s parents was a police officer, and he told me that in his experience most accidents are caused in just that moment when the driver looks down at the radio, to adjust the dial or the volume level.  Hence the design in many late model cars putting the radio controls on the steering wheel.

I fired up the Ring video doorbell footage and looked to 3 a.m.  The battery on the front door had died, but by the front eaves camera I could see Andrea arrive home.  She made too wide a turn into the driveway, hit and knocked over a corner of the neighbor’s fence, backed up and righted herself, and pulled straight into the driveway.  So there was a fence we would have to pay for.

On the east camera I could see the top of her silver Jeep Wrangler pull up to the front door.  The image was grainy, but from above, the grill, hood, and fenders of the car appeared to be intact.  I heard her get out of the car, shut the door, and climb the steps to the front door of the house.  She did not walk around to the front of the car to check for any damage.

The front of the car looks fine, at least from this angle, I said.  It can’t have been much of an accident, I told Philip.

I looked ahead a few minutes on the Ring and saw the police arrive at the house.  So where had the accident happened?  One officer was looking at the far fender, the right front, and looking under the front of the car.  I could hear Andrea in the background saying to one of the officers, My car is all fucked up.

No, I said to myself, "it sounds as though you’re all fucked up, my dear.  In a way, perhaps it would be a wake-up call for her, I thought.  The Dixie Chicks sing about sending your kids out there into the wide open spaces, room to make the big mistakes."  Maybe this would be a valuable lesson going forward.  I hoped that no one was seriously injured.

I showed up at school early, as usual.  I was a speech-language pathologist at an elementary school in Tenafly, New Jersey, an upper middle class enclave just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, a quick hop onto the George Washington Bridge.

Most people, when they think of speech-language therapy at all, think only of speech articulation, stuttering, voice.  But most of our clients and students these days are those with significant language delays and disorders, auditory processing disorders, children and young adults on the autism spectrum, older clients who are post-stroke, post-traumatic brain injury, or having swallowing difficulties.  The range of issues we address is wide and deep, so it can be frustrating when people think that all I do is turn a wabbit into a rabbit or a bowl of thoop into a bowl of soup.

So I arrived at school an hour early, as usual, and didn’t even think about what might be going on down in Austin.  Philip would be in touch with Ben, and Ben would straighten things out.  I set up my room for my kids, got out my therapy materials, checked e-mail, and went to an early Child Study meeting with a set of parents, teachers, our assistant principal.

When I got back to my room, I pressed the wake-up button on my phone and the screen lit up with a text from Philip saying simply, Call me.

I think I knew then, and everything seemed to slow down.  I didn’t feel panic or weak in the knees, but suddenly lethargic, like a suspension of time and space.  I thought it might feel nice to lie down on the floor and just curl up and go to sleep.  My legs and arms heavy, I walked across the room to the wall phone, because I have a hard time hearing properly on cell phones, and I prefer to use them only for texting, or for emergencies.  I dialed Philip’s number, and the voice that answered sounded like a deeper, older version of him, like someone who had only just reluctantly emerged from a coma.

It’s me, I said.

Honey. he said hoarsely.  And then I heard him swallow hard and clear his throat so that he could speak again.

She killed somebody.

TRANSCRIPT OF OFFICER’S INTERVIEW WITH ANDREA SCOTT

STATE OF TEXAS VS. ANDREA SCOTT IN TRAVIS COUNTY, TEXAS

Original Statement given by Andrea Scott upon first contact

with APD Officers

The following proceedings were transcribed from Officers’ first contact with Andrea Scott and the subsequent on scene interview and field sobriety tests involving Officer H and Andrea Scott (Defendant) at 3:15 a.m. on February 9, 2018.

UNKNOWN OFFICER (Time: 3:20:53 AM): (Andrea opens the front door to her house.)  Hi, how you doing?  Uh, who’s vehicle is the Jeep?

AS:  That’s mine.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  That’s yours?

AS:  Yeah, what’s up?

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  What happened to it?

AS:  What do you mean?

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Do you wanna take a step out and see what happened to your jeep?  Who was driving that tonight?

AS:  Yeah, that was mine.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Were you driving?

AS:  I was.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  You just get home?

AS:  I don’t know, like 30 or 40 minutes ago.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  30 or 40 minutes ago?  Where were you coming from?

AS:  I was coming from downtown.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Yeah?  Were you drinking tonight?

AS:  I was.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  You were?

AS:  Yeah.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Do you, uh, have a driver’s license with you right now?

AS:  Not with me off the top of my hand (sic).

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Will you go ahead and turn around for me.  Go ahead and turn around.  Right now you’re being detained, okay?

AS:  Are you sure you don’t want my driver’s license?

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  You can just give us your name and date of birth.

AS:  Can you… can you lock my house though?

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  We can.  Do you got keys inside we can get to?  So we can lock it for you.

AS:  I mean, yeah, somewhere inside, but it’s in that purse, but, like, my dog is going to come at the door.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Okay, what kinda dog?

AS:  He’s a pug.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Okay.

AS:  Please be careful, I might have locked him in my room.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Is there anybody else in the house?

AS:  Yeah, my roommate.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Your roommate is in the house?

AS:  In the room to the left, if you go down the hall to the left.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Okay.  And where is your purse at?  Are these your keys?

AS:  What?  What… what’s he asking?  I don’t have anything.

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Nothing at all?

AS:  Nothing at all.  I promise.  I wouldn’t lie.  Please… Please close the door before he goes wandering.

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Go ahead and sit down please, go ahead and sit down.

AS:  I just want the dog to be safe.  That’s all I care about.

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Okay.

AS:  I just want the dog to be safe.  (Inaudible dialogue about the dog.)

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Yeah I know, I hear ya.  I mean your roommate is here, right?  Hey, hey sit down.  Please stay right there, stay right there.

AS:  I… I am not going to hurt anybody (inaudible dialogue)

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  What’s your last name?

AS:  (Spells last name.)

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  (Repeats spelling.)

AS:  (Verifies spelling.)

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Your first name?

AS:  Andrea.

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Andrea.  What’s your birthday, Andrea?

AS:  (Gives date of birth.)

 2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  (Repeats date of birth.)  Is it in here, your ID?

AS:  My ID, not it’s, do you know where my phone is?

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Is it in here?

AS:  Yeah, probably.  If it’s not in there….

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  This one?

AS:  Yeah, yeah.

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Your dog is just fine.  He’s in the bedroom.

AS:  (Inaudible dialogue.)

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  No, no, he’s just in the bedroom.

3rd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  I want to wake her up, to make sure we got the right person here.

AS:  No, no, he’s a him.  His name is Cole Campbell.  He’s in the other room.

3rd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Is he going to bite me?  (Talking to AS about her dog.)

AS:  He’s not going to bite you.  He’s a pug in the other room.

UNKNOWN OFFICER (Time 3:27:44 am):  Reads Miranda Rights to Andrea.

AS:  Responds she understands to each of the questions (begins crying leading to inaudible dialogue).

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  (Speaking to Roommate Cole Campbell.)

AS:  Are you, were you talking to Cole?

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  I was.

AS:  Do you have water?

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Have water?  I do not.

AS:  Cole didn’t do anything.  Cole did nothing.  (Begins speaking inaudibly to another officer.)

UNKNOWN OFFICER (Time: 3:33:29 AM):  Andrea, do you know what’s going on?

AS:  I have no idea.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Is that because you don’t remember, or you’re kinda putting it together now?  Or has someone told you?

AS:  Yeah, a little bit of both.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Okay.  So is there anything you’re not telling us at this point?

AS:  No.

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  No?  Okay, where were you coming from?

AS:  (Indicates she does not know.)

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  You don’t know?  Earlier you were telling us you were coming from downtown?  Were you working tonight?

AS:  (Responds inaudibly.)

UNKNOWN OFFICER:  Did you hang out with friends afterwards?  You don’t want to talk to us?  You need some shoes?

2nd UNKNOWN OFFICER:  If she wants some socks and shoes, I can find her some.

AS:  It’s on the left, I mean right (indicating location of her room).

NO FURTHER AUDIBLE COMMUNICATION WITH AS UNTIL OFFICER H BEGINS INTERVIEWING HER.

OFFICER H (Time: 4:25:24 AM):  Hey, how you doing ma’am?

AS:  I’m okay.

OFFICER H:  My name is Officer H, with APD, what’s your name?

AS:  (Gives her name.)

OFFICER H:  What’s your DOB?

AS:  (Gives her date of birth.)

OFFICER H:  What’s a good address for you?

AS:  (Gives her address.)

OFFICER H:  What’s a good phone number for you?

AS:  (Gives her phone number.)

OFFICER H:  All right, so let me ask you this.  Do you know why we, ten, fifteen of us are here?  Do you know why we’re out here?

AS:  More or less, it seems like there was an accident.

OFFICER H:  All right, so can you tell me what happened?

AS:  I can’t.

OFFICER H:  Why not?

AS:  Because I don’t know.

OFFICER H:  You don’t know?

AS:  No.

OFFICER H:  Okay, um, let me backtrack just a little bit, okay?  Let’s start with this.  So do you know what day it is?

AS:  It’s February 8, 2018.

OFFICER H:  All right.  Let me ask you this.  Without looking at a watch or time piece, what time do you think it is right now.

AS:  Probably some time after 2:00 AM.

OFFICER H (Time: 4:27:20 AM):  All right, so I’m actually going to correct you on one thing, just the date.  The date is actually February the 9th, the morning of, and the time is 4:23 AM according to my watch, okay?

AS:  Okay.

OFFICER H:  All right, so I just wanted, that way we can establish a base here, okay?

AS:  Yeah.

OFFICER H:  All right.  So let me ask you this.  What’s the last thing you remember?

AS:  I remember being in bed with my dog and, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you what time it was, but it was after I got off work, which is 11:30.

OFFICER H:  11:30 PM or AM?

AS:  PM.

OFFICER H:  So you got off work at 11:30 PM?

AS:  Yeah, February 8th.

OFFICER H:  Okay.

AS:  And I was asleep, and that’s the last thing I remember.

OFFICER H:  When do you usually get to work?

AS:  3:00 PM.

OFFICER H:  So you worked from 3:00 until 11:30 AM?  Excuse me, I mean 11:30 PM.

AS:  Yeah, 3:00 PM to 11:30 PM.

OFFICER H:  All right, so eight and a half hours you were at work.  Where do you work at?

AS:  (Gives name of workplace.)

OFFICER H:  Is that the hotel?

AS:  Yeah.

OFFICER H:  Okay, all right.

AS:  I’m a Front Desk Agent.

OFFICER H:  All right, front desk?

AS:  Yeah.

OFFICER H:  Okay, so from 11:30 PM to now, you don’t remember anything?

AS:  No.

OFFICER H:  You don’t remember getting a knock at the door?

AS:  I do remember someone knocking at the door and I went to answer it, and at that point I went outside my house because my dog is kinda forward and likes to answer the door with me.  So I went outside my house and there were police officers there and at that point I was answering questions.

OFFICER H:  What kinda questions did they ask you?

AS:  Where I was and at what time, basically.

OFFICER H:  And what was your answer?

AS:  It was what I remembered at the time.  So I think, it started around 2… 2:00 AM, something like that, and I answered where I was at 2:00 AM.  I feel like at that point I would have been driving.

OFFICER H:  Okay, so at 2:00 AM you feel like you would have been driving?

AS:  Mhmm.

OFFICER H:  Why would you have felt like you would’ve been driving?

AS:  Because I was leaving the area around which I was driving to go home.

OFFICER H:  Okay, so where were you at during that time period?

AS:  I was downtown.

OFFICER H:  Where at downtown?

AS:  Umm, Latitude, something like that.  Then I went to another gay bar nearby Latitude.  I think it’s on Colorado.

OFFICER H:  Colorado?  Okay.

AS:  Something like that.

OFFICER H:  Let me ask you, so we’ve already established that you went to work at 3:00 PM and got off at 11:30 PM, right?  Is that correct?

AS:  Mhmm.

OFFICER H:  All right, so let me ask you this.  When you left work at 11:30 PM, where did you go as soon as you left work?

AS:  As soon as I left work, I went to my colleague’s house.

OFFICER H:  If you