Daniel Schuler, husband of the 36-year-old woman who caused a highway crash that killed eight people, insists that his wife was not drunk and high behind the wheel, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“My heart is clear,” Schuler said of his wife Diane, who was also killed in the accident. “She did not drink. She is not an alcoholic.” However, 10 ounces of undigested alcohol were found in her system, as well as high levels of the main component in marijuana.
“I never saw her drunk since the day I met her,” he added. His wife is blamed for killing her 2-year-old daughter, her three nieces, and three men in a head-on collision on New York’s Taconic State Parkway on July 26.
Daniel Schuler and his family suggest that his wife’s diabetes, a sudden stroke, or a tooth abscess may have caused her to drive the wrong way down the highway. But given the evidence—including a broken bottle of vodka that was found at the crash site—it is far more likely that Diane Schuler kept her alcoholism a secret from her family, including her husband.
ABC News reports that experts say it’s possible to hide the worst of habits. “Any good addict, over time, becomes better and better at hiding and sneaking their use,” said Brenda Iliff, clinical director of the Hazelden Women’s Recovery Center in Center City, Minnesota.
“What generally happens with addiction [is that] at some point somebody may say something, and people go into shame, they may pull it in and control it and keep it from other people.”
Alcoholism is on the rise, particularly among women. In the United States, women are five times more likely to die of alcohol-related illness than of breast cancer. And many of these women are keeping their drinking habit hidden from their families and friends.
Diana, who didn’t want ABC News to use her last name, hid her alcoholism for many years from her loved ones. “If you keep it a secret,” she said, “you don’t have to give it up even though you have a problem. You know, if nobody knows that you have this problem, you don’t have to give it up.”
When “Good Morning America” first met Diana, she said her drinking was out of control, and that she sometimes drove while intoxicated. “It’s really scary driving home and not remembering how I got home,” she said. No one in her family knew about her problem until she went public on “Good Morning America” to face her alcoholism with the help of William Cope Moyers, an addiction expert with the Hazelden Women’s Recovery Center.
Diana’s treatment is off to a strong start. “It’s hope that I’m going to take the steps,” she said. “It’s one big step and then maybe tiny steps, and I’m going to be healthy again, and that’s what I want.”
The shame that many women feel about their alcoholism is often what keeps them from reaching out for help, forcing them to make dangerous decisions. According to FBI figures, the number of women arrested for DUIs was nearly 30 percent higher in 2007 than it was a decade earlier, while the number of men arrested for DUI was 7.5 percent lower. Men are still responsible for more drunk-driving cases, but the gap is narrowing.
Diane Schuler’s family and lawyer say they are baffled about what happened. When she left an upstate campground around 9:30 am with her two children and three nieces in the car, she appeared to be completely sober. She reportedly called her brother, the father of the three girls, around 1:00 pm and said that she didn’t feel well. One of the girls reportedly talked to her father and said that Diane was having trouble speaking and seeing.
Diane then drove the wrong way down the highway for 1.7 miles, dodging oncoming cars until she slammed into an SUV. Her minivan tumbled down an embankment and then burst into flames. Diane’s 5-year-old son, Brian, survived the crash, but her daughter Erin and nieces Alyson, Emma, and Katie Hance were killed, along with the three people in the SUV.
Schuler’s blood alcohol level was 0.19, more than twice the legal limit. The toxicology reports showed that she had the equivalent of 10 drinks in her stomach and elevated levels of THC, the active chemical in marijuana. Investigators also found a broken 1.7 ounce bottle of vodka at the crash scene, but can’t say whether the bottle was in the car.
While Schuler’s family and lawyer insist that she didn’t get drunk and high willingly because it “wasn’t who she was as a person,” experts disagree. “If they found elevated alcohol levels in her blood, she must have ingested it,” said Dr. Pierre Fayad, chairman of the University of Nebraska Medical Center Department of Neurological Sciences. “Unfortunately, alcoholism and drug addiction are often missed or underestimated by family members.”
The family’s lawyer, Dominic Barbara, recently suggested that Schuler may have ingested alcohol in an attempt to raise a low blood-sugar level, but experts say this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of diabetes and stroke.
“Blaming the accident on a stroke preceding it is possible, like anything else, but not plausible,” Fayad said. “Having high or low blood sugar acutely does not cause a stroke. It is the long-term effect of diabetes that increases the risk of stroke.”
Fayed pointed out that infections, like the abscess in Schuler’s mouth that the family described earlier in the week, can also elevate the blood sugar and precipitate a crisis situation.
Dr. Aman Patel, director of the Neurosurgery Residency Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center, added,“There is no way that having a stroke or the diabetes prompted her to drink. There is no medical explanation that would explain that assertion.”
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