by Ian Halperin
When I spoke to one of Pat’s former employees who spends the winter in Miami, she told me that Pat is “above reproach” and completely trustworthy.
“Pat always looked out for Whitney’s interests when she worked for her,” she explained. “That wasn’t always an easy task, there were some hard times, but Pat really tried. Her husband [Whitney’s brother Gary] had his own issues, so she knew a thing or two about navigating around Whitney’s stuff but it was hard on her. If anybody knows the skeletons, it’s Pat but she’ll never tell. She also did a lot for Krissi after her mother died. Pat was determined to look out for her but Krissi kept pushing back. I haven’t been around and I don’t know Nick but I think it’s been really hard on Pat and Cissy to see Krissi go down that path. I can’t imagine how they must be feeling about what happened, like revisiting a nightmare.”
Indeed, I have been impressed watching the Houston family handle the circus that has revolved around Bobbi since the day she was found. It is a refreshing contrast to the antics of Bobby Brown’s buffoonish clan, even though I have been equally impressed by Bobby’s quiet dignity as he maintains his daily bedside vigil. It seems apparent that he has finally overcome his long battle with substance abuse and alcohol. It is a reminder of what might have been—both personally and professionally—had he and Whitney not succumbed to the addictions that plagued them both.
Nick’s fight over Whitney’s money, in fact, brings up the specter of what might happen to the trust should Bobbi succumb. Whitney’s original will has caused some confusion because of its stipulation that her money would go to Cissy should Bobbi predecease her mother. Many media outlets have interpreted this provision to mean Cissy is entitled to the trust—ninety percent of which has not yet been distributed—if Bobbi dies. However, my legal sources assure me this is not the case. Under Georgia law, the estate of Bobbi Kristina Brown will go to her next of kin. Unless Nick can provide evidence that the couple were legally wed, her father, Bobby Brown, will inherit everything. I can only imagine that this is why his embarrassing family is hovering like vultures and publicly leveling accusations against both Nick and Pat.
* * *
There are many conflicting reports about what happened in the weeks and days leading up to January 31. Almost everything reported on entertainment sites purporting to come from “sources close to the family” is either deeply suspect or provably wrong.
We know for a fact that security called 911 on January 23 to report a domestic dispute inside the town house. However, nobody appears to know what happened or how it was resolved because the neighbor who reported the incident declined to call 911.
We know that four days later, on January 27, Bobbi was driving her Jeep Liberty late in the afternoon in Roswell when she lost control of the vehicle and crossed a lane, colliding with a Ford Taurus coming in the other direction. Riding with her was Danyela Bradley, the young woman who was present four days later when she was found in the tub. Bobbi and the other driver, forty-one-year-old Russell Eckerman, were brought to the hospital. Bobbi was treated for minor injuries, but Eckerman was listed as in critical condition.
Bobbi had been pulled over by the police on September 9, 2014, for “driving with expired tags.” The day after the January 27 accident, a bench warrant was issued against her because she hadn’t shown up in Alpharetta Municipal Court to answer that charge.
There are unconfirmed reports that Bobbi and Nick had been fighting and that they had called off their supposed engagement. But the last thing we know for sure is that on January 29, Bobbi had posted the tweet: “On My Own.”
Other than that, almost everything is secondhand.
* * *
I knew I couldn’t rely on the dubious accounts of those who claim to know the couple at the circle of this mystery. I needed to somehow worm my way into the Atlanta drug circles that I assumed held secrets that could shed light on the events of January 31. But I had no idea how to go about it.
Twenty years earlier, I had spent more than a month in Seattle, immersing myself in the city’s notorious drug scene while I researched a book about the final days of Kurt Cobain. In the midst of my investigation, I spent considerable time with my coauthor hanging out in heroin “shooting galleries,” places where junkies go to shoot up. It was on one of these undercover ventures, in fact, where I got my first real break—meeting Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, the musician who bought the shotgun that killed the rock icon. Unaware that I was an undercover journalist, he shared some crucial information as we jammed together before he excused himself to shoot up.
The most difficult thing about that adventure was spending hours at a time in the sordid conditions of these run-down houses surrounded by junkies without drawing attention to the fact that I wasn’t one myself. But I was much younger then, and I had caught a lucky break when a Bulgarian musician I had played with offered an entrée.
A local shooting gallery was exactly the kind of locale where I might find the kind of information I was seeking. But I had no idea how to go about finding one in Atlanta and gaining access. My investigator informed me which sections of the city were notorious for heroin. Indeed, when I patrolled these neighborhoods’ streets, they were certainly very seamy and didn’t at all resemble the neighborhoods where I had hung out in Seattle on a similar quest twenty years before.
And although I saw at least a couple dozen denizens who looked as if they spent a fair amount of time in shooting galleries, I knew I couldn’t just approach one to ask directions. For one thing, no matter how I dressed, I feared that a middle-aged pudgy guy like me would have screamed “Cop.”
Alas, two days of sniffing around got me nowhere. When I consulted a friend in Miami who has worked with addicts, she suggested I locate a methadone clinic and try my luck there. It was a good suggestion, but three hours outside two separate clinics yielded zero results. Nobody wanted to talk to me. It was disheartening and a little embarrassing to know that my much-vaunted investigative skills were failing me.
Then my friend had another suggestion. “Why don’t you go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting,” she said. “You might just find potheads but you’ll definitely find some people who know the drug scene, and you won’t stand out.”
She told me that Narcotics Anonymous is roughly similar to Alcoholics Anonymous and follows the same twelve-step principles. It sounded worth trying. It took me only fifteen minutes online to find a meeting taking place that night at a local church. When I got there, my only fear was that I’d have to talk about what brought me there. I came up with a story about my coke habit and how I’d been clean for four years and attended regular meetings in Miami which is, after all, the coke capital of America.
When I got there, however, I was fifteen minutes early, and I found a slew of people smoking outside the church. I discovered they were waiting for the meeting to begin, and all but one were regulars. As it turned out, I was not the least bit conspicuous, because they were older than I had expected. They were all male. The only thing conspicuous about me was that I don’t actually smoke. But I quickly bummed a cigarette and started a conversation.
I told them I was from Miami, and within a minute I had managed to bring up Bobbi Kristina. Alas, none of them knew her or Nick or anybody that knows them, although they all seemed to have an opinion on the case. Most believed it was a suicide. One man thought Nick had been “acting suspicious.” A couple of minutes into the conversation, I brought up the temperature of the bathwater to see if somebody could enlighten me about what that might mean. That’s when one of my new acquaintances—a man with a goatee who looked to be in his early forties and who had actually theorized that Bobbi attempted suicide—said, “She probably took the plunge.”
I had no idea what that meant, and I still don’t know why any of these people are in NA. But it’s evident from the way he spoke that he was a former junkie. He told me that when somebody “drops”—which seems to be a term for an OD—there are all kinds of ways to revive them.
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“I’ve never seen it done with a bath,” he said to me, “but I sort of helped bring somebody around with a cold shower. You stick them under the cold water and you slap them to bring them around. I didn’t do the hitting, but I held somebody up while a buddy did. It worked.” He told me he’d heard of the same method being used in a cold bath.
He explained that “hopheads”—slang for junkies—use all kinds of remedies to bring somebody around when they drop. Some of them are “stupid,” he explained, like [injecting] “salt water.” It was a little hard to follow but he seemed to imply that he wasn’t necessarily talking about heroin overdoses, or at least not exclusively. Overdoses can be caused by any number of other drugs. He told me that his drug buddies used to use something that is very effective when he OD’ed, but he used a technical name that I couldn’t remember afterward. What surprised me most was his explanation that overdoses are much more common than I thought and that most people survive the experience. He said he had dropped at least three times, and that’s one of the reasons he’s in NA, but he never told me what drug or drugs he was addicted to, and I never asked. The meeting was about to start, or I would have persisted in my questioning. In the end, I decided I had gotten what I needed and left without going inside—still nervous that I would have to deliver my phony story to a roomful of seasoned addicts.
What intrigued me as much as his story about cold baths is his description of “slapping” the overdose victim. Could this be how Bobbi sustained the facial bruises that paramedics reportedly found that morning? Is this why the water was ice-cold?
Eager to test out my new theory, I begin searching. Within fifteen minutes, I find scores of sites related to drug abuse or treatment that address the idea of a cold-water bath for overdose victims. Each one goes out of its way to warn against this method, indicating that it must be very common. Many other sites list cold-water baths in a list of the most common myths and old wives’ tales about reviving overdose victims.
The North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, for example, warns, “Do Not put the person in an ice-cold bath, it could put them into shock, or they could drown.”
According to Medical Assisted Treatment of America, “If you put someone who has overdosed in a shower or bath, you could send them into shock by changing their body temperature too quickly. They could also drown if their lungs get filled with water.”
And despite the countless warnings against this dangerous practice, I find a staggering amount of people on drug abuse forums advising people to use the cold-water method and slap the victim’s face or revealing that they have used this method themselves. Although it would obviously be safer to call 911 and seek medical help, they admit they go out of their way not to alert the authorities, for fear of being arrested for felony drug possession. That is why these home remedies are so common.
I also found a telling passage from the memoir of a former junkie, Once an Addict, in which the author, Barry Woodward, discusses one of his overdoses.
I went blue in the face and my eyes rolled into the back of my head. Any heroin overdose has the potential to be fatal, and the best remedy is to put the person in a bath of cold water, or inject them with salt water. Joey freaked out because he had never seen anything like this before, but Lisa was there and she knew what to do. She ran into the bathroom and turned the cold water tap on full; she then told Joey to slap me in the face.
In an Arizona newspaper, the Cronkite News, I find an account describing the demise of a twenty-eight-year-old overdose victim named Natasha Gates who died in 2012: “Passed out from the heroin, her friend and his roommate partially undressed her and put her in a bathtub filled with cold water to help suppress Natasha’s overdose symptoms. Both fell asleep and when they woke, she was dead,” the article states.
Can these accounts solve the mystery of why Bobbi was found in a cold-water bath and why she had unexplained bruises on her face?
I call Calvin Whitehead, a substance Abuse Therapist at the Greenleaf drug treatment center in Valdosta, Georgia, to run the theory by him.
Whitehead tells me that he has heard of the cold-water revival method and slapping the overdose victim but stresses that
It’s not anything we would suggest in response to an overdose, it’s such an emergency type of situation. The nature of an overdose is that the drug is affecting your brain to the point where it’s affecting your brain stem, which is affecting your breathing so if the drug is impacting your brain stem to the point that it’s shutting down your respiratory system, cold water and slapping will have limited effect.
I follow up with a call to Dr. Christopher La Tourette La Riche, medical director of Florida’s Lucida Treatment Center, asking him if the cold-water bath method might have any effect.
When someone ODs, what happens is that somebody stops breathing. Cold water might just give them a sensory shock and arouse them but it wouldn’t reverse the opiate block on their receptors, it wouldn’t do that. But if they’re in the gray area where it’s not a full-on overdose, they’re just sedated and just fading, something as shocking as an ice-water bath might make them a little more alert. But if they’re in full-on overdose I can’t see what it would do. But if they’re in the gray area I can see it.
The cold-water bath theory—if correct—would answer some of the pressing questions about the circumstances that led to Bobbi being found almost drowned in a bath of ice-cold water. Most significantly, it would likely rule out foul play. But it would also raise a number of other questions that only the police can answer and still doesn’t let Bobbi’s friends off the hook. Did one of them leave her alone in the bathtub to answer the door for the cable technician? Or did they both panic when the doorbell rang and leave the bathroom to clean up drug paraphernalia and residue? How did Bobbi end up facedown? Might she have flailed in shock when the water revived her and landed facedown in the water after she was left alone?
When I asked the former homicide detective about the various scenarios, he told me he thinks the police are very unlikely to lay charges if Bobbi survives. If she dies, however, he believes somebody will be charged.
“If they find narcotics in her system, or even pills she obtained without a prescription, they’re going to be looking at how and where she got the drugs,” he said. “They probably already know a lot and they’re just sitting on it to see whether she survives. This is a big case, it involves a celebrity; they’re going to want to find a culprit. I assume somebody’s going down.”
Of course, the cold-water bath theory doesn’t rule out suicide. It’s possible that Bobbi—depressed about the upcoming anniversary or her breakup with Nick—ingested a large quantity of Xanax and was on the verge of blacking out when her friends discovered her. Trying to revive her from a pill-induced stupor, they could have immersed her in cold water and slapped her, causing the facial bruises. But if so, why have both men been so reluctant to cooperate with the police? Indeed, they both immediately lawyered up.
Who gave Bobbi the drugs? Was Nick attempting to conceal evidence if he cleaned up the scene before authorities arrived, as Max reportedly alleged? Is Max’s own extensive drug record the reason why police haven’t offered him immunity, for fear that they may be letting the guilty party off the hook?
These questions invoke the call I received only four days after Bobbi’s body was found. The caller is not tied to the Roswell PD, which is investigating the circumstances of Bobbi’s case. But, although not a cop himself, he does have a direct tie to the Atlanta Police Department. He told me that, from the information he had garnered from colleagues soon after Bobbi was found, “It looks like we have another Natalie Wood.”
When he told me this, I assumed he was referring to the fact that it was another unexplained celebrity drowning. As I delved into the facts of Bobbi’s case, however, I discovered some remarkable parallels.
In 1981, the legendary star of West Side Story and Miracle on 34th Street was on a weekend boat trip to Santa Catalina Island in Cali
fornia with her husband, Robert Wagner, and the costar of her most recent film, Christopher Walken. Around eight in the morning of November 29, Wood’s body was discovered drowned a mile away from the boat. Wagner reported that when he went to bed the night before, his wife wasn’t there. The autopsy report would later reveal that the star had bruises on her arms and an abrasion on her cheek when she was found. The coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning.
But thirty years later, the only other person on board that weekend—the captain, Dennis Davern—confessed that he had lied to the police during the initial investigation. He told the Today show he had heard Wood and Wagner arguing the evening before and he now believed that Wagner was responsible for his wife’s death. However, Walken was also on board and Davern couldn’t account for his whereabouts on the night in question. There were simply too many unanswered questions and so nobody was ever charged. The cause of death, however, was changed from drowning to “undetermined.”
The parallels to the Bobbi Kristina case are indeed strikingly obvious, including unexplained bruises and more than one person present in the house who may or may not have been involved. Only the toxicology report—or in the worst-case scenario, an autopsy—can definitively answer the question about which, if any, drugs Bobbi Kristina had in her body at the time she was found. It’s possible that authorities will unveil new evidence that discredits the cold-water bath theory completely.
It’s also possible that, like the drowning of Wood, we may never know what happened that morning.
However she ended up unconscious in the tub, some will argue that Bobbi Kristina’s fate was sealed years earlier, growing up at the center of the world’s most famous dysfunctional couple. Others have already argued that Whitney’s own fate was inevitable, given the unhappiness of hiding her sexuality for the sake of stardom.