This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. on July 18 to include a comment from Megan Trussell’s mother, Vanessa Diaz.
For months, the parents of Megan Trussell, an 18-year-old CU Boulder student who went missing in February, have questioned the Boulder County Coroner Office’s determination that Trussell died by suicide.
The coroner’s office issued an opinion that Trussell died “as a result of the toxic effects of amphetamine” — a key ingredient in Adderall — with hypothermia as a contributing factor. They based their suicide determination largely on the high level of amphetamine in Trussell’s blood and the “abundant” volume of pill material found in her stomach. Trussell’s parents were skeptical that the extremely high volume of pill material in Trussell’s stomach — approximately 150 milliliters — was Adderall, and pushed to have their daughter’s stomach contents tested.
On July 16, the coroner’s office published an updated autopsy report with the results of the tests on Trussell’s stomach contents. The tests confirmed only the presence of amphetamine and ethanol that was “consistent with degradation of biological material … (decomposition).” The amphetamine levels also tested much higher in the stomach — 1,700,000 ng/mL compared to 1,900 ng/mL in blood tests. The coroner’s office maintained that the amphetamine caused Trussell’s death and that the manner of death was suicide.
“The only fatal condition is that her entire upper esophagus and stomach was filled with pill material. It’s the most I’ve ever seen in my 14 years of experience,” Boulder County Forensic Pathologist Meredith Frank told Trussell’s parents in a June 4 meeting, based on a recording obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab.
Vanessa Diaz, Trussell’s mother, told Boulder Reporting Lab, “This doesn’t really change anything for me.” She has suggested that somebody forced her daughter to ingest the pills.
“I knew that they would say whatever was in her stomach was something she took on her own, but I don’t believe that,” she said of the coroner’s office. “I still believe it was forced ingestion because of the hemorrhaging in her esophagus, and the multiple injuries that they can’t explain.”
The coroner’s office did not publicly report hemorrhaging of the esophagus, but Frank told the family she had “never seen this distention of the lumen of the esophagus by pill material.” The injuries Diaz refers to are blunt-force injuries to the head and body, which the coroner’s office has said could be consistent with a fall.
Diaz added that Joe Trussell, Megan’s father, told her that 1,700 mg of amphetamine would equate to 68 of Megan’s 25 mg Adderall capsules, “which she did not have available to her.”
“Sixty-eight capsules is still nowhere near the 700 that it would take to make a softball-sized mass,” she said, referring to a description of the amount of pill material she said she received from pathologists at the coroner’s office.
Diaz said she is still waiting for a response from the coroner about whether they test stomach contents for vitamins or other minerals.
Trussell’s parents have accused investigators of prematurely ruling out other possible causes of her death, overlooking signs of potential foul play such as the injuries and failing to fully explore inconsistencies in the evidence. The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office has defended its handling of the case.
The injuries ( chipped teeth, blunt force trauma to her head, broken and scraped fingernails) that Megan had do not support “sucide”. How does her missing shoe (still missing), purse with the strap torn and her cellphone all found in separate locations from her body. If she jumped why wasn’t there any blood found on the rocks ? Why wasn’t she found sooner, her body was in the open and readily seen from the road. I highly doubt that any un- housed person would willing give up the large amount of pills found in her esophagus and stomach. Why wasn’t her gastric contents, fingernail scrapings and other biological swabs sent to the lab until her mother and father insisted that testing be done? The need for Boulder and the University to have her death ruled as a suicide outweighed the search for the truth of what really happened to Megan.