Huang tried reaching him at his apartment around 11:15 but got no answer. It just rang and rang. Huang and Gruenwald shared their unease a few hours later and tried calling Greg again from Huang’s office. Still no response.
By this point, Gruenwald was worried enough to wonder whether he should go over there. Greg lived only ten minutes away. But he got lost in his work and never made it out of the office.
By 5 P.M., Gruenwald figured Greg must’ve had a family emergency. The previous week, he’d worked a half day on Thursday so he could deal with a family problem, and he left a little early on Friday to meet up with his in-laws. Maybe the problem had gotten out of hand. Greg also hadn’t been feeling well the week before. The previous Monday morning, he came to the office feeling crummy and told a coworker that he’d thrown up after drinking only a couple of beers that weekend. Not to mention he seemed unusually agitated all week. Especially on Friday.
At 5:40 P.M., Huang and Gruenwald huddled together and tried calling Greg again on the speakerphone. There was still no answer. They were quite befuddled.
Huang tried once more around 7 P.M., just before leaving the office, and this time Kristin picked up. He asked to speak to Greg, but Kristin said he was sleeping. Huang asked if everything was all right, because Greg hadn’t come to work that day. Kristin said she’d phoned Orbigen that morning and left a message saying Greg wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be coming in. Didn’t they get it? She apologized if no one received the message. Kristin thanked him for calling and hung up.
The call left Huang feeling uneasy. He sensed a strange edge to Kristin’s voice. She seemed unresponsive, like she wanted to get off the phone. He wondered why she wouldn’t let him talk to Greg. Why, if Greg was home all day, didn’t he pick up the phone? And why didn’t anyone at Orbigen get the message Kristin said she left?
Gruenwald called Greg’s apartment once more as well, around 9:30 P.M. A frazzled Kristin answered on the first ring. She was crying, and he could hardly understand her.
“Greg isn’t feeling well, and the ambulance is here. I really can’t talk,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”
Gruenwald waited until 1 A.M. to hear back from her. Still troubled, he finally gave up and went to bed.
Paramedic Sean Jordan and his assistant, April Butler, had just finished a quick dinner at Rubio’s, a fish taco restaurant, when they got a call at 9:23 P.M.: young male down, not breathing and no pulse. They were only a mile or two from the address on Regents Road. With the ambulance siren blaring and red lights flashing, they sped down Torrey Pines Road and arrived three minutes later.
The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) had purchased the La Jolla Del Sol complex about a year earlier as off-campus housing, so the 911 call went first to the campus police dispatch center.
“My husband is not breathing,” Kristin told the dispatcher.
The UCSD dispatcher transferred Kristin to the city of San Diego’s fire-medical dispatcher, who stayed on the phone with her until the paramedics were inside her apartment. The Del Sol security guard was also alerted about the 911 call, so he’d already opened the gate for Jordan and Butler by the time they pulled up to the red-tiled driveway.
Balconies with gray railings lined the mocha-colored buildings of Del Sol, which blended into the sea of residential towers in north University City, a densely populated neighborhood of college students and young professionals who worked at UCSD or the biotech, high-tech, and finance companies nearby. The area, dubbed “the Golden Triangle” because it was contained by three intersecting freeways, had grown up first around the university and then, during the late 1970s, around University Towne Center, a shopping mall. Apartment or condo complexes sprang up and filled up, followed by office and medical buildings, restaurants, bars, and gyms, until virtually every lot was developed. Many of the local professors, doctors, lawyers, and real estate developers lived a couple of miles to the west in the older and more affluent coastal community of La Jolla.
Jordan and Butler carried their gear up the stairs to the second-floor apartment, where they found Kristin standing in the living room, crying and talking to the dispatcher on a cordless phone. She motioned them to the bedroom, where Greg was lying on the floor, flat on his back and framed by an unmade queen-size bed to the left, a chest of three long drawers to the right, and a taller six-drawer bureau above his head. His slim, six-foot, 160-pound body was dressed in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. His skin was pale, and his lips were blue around the edges. Red rose petals were scattered on the carpet around his upper torso, with a single stem and stamen lying between his head, the bureau, and a princess phone. Jordan started setting up next to Greg’s left arm. Butler tripped over the comforter as she squeezed into position between Greg’s head and the bureau, setting aside an unframed wedding photo of the couple, which had been propped up against the base of the bureau, as if someone had positioned it just so.
Greg looked a little nervous in the photo. He smiled for the camera with a quiet contentment, all dressed up in his tuxedo and striped cravat, his dark brown hair slicked back and his blue eyes shining. Kristin looked radiant, her shiny blond locks pulled up under a white-flowered tiara and a veil trailing down her back. She wore a string of pearls with her white dress, which had short lace sleeves that covered her shoulders, and she held a bouquet of pink and white flowers tied with bows of ribbon. They both seemed so very happy as Greg declared his supreme devotion to her in front of their friends and family.
In all the commotion, the wedding photo got moved to the top of the chest on Greg’s right side, next to a blue plastic cup of clear, odorless liquid that looked like water. An open bottle of aspirin that contained about a quarter of its original two hundred tablets sat atop the bureau behind Butler. And a yellow cup, also containing clear, odorless liquid, rested on a nightstand on the opposite side of the bed.
Several campus police officers arrived just before paramedic Joe Preciado rode up on a fire engine and joined Butler and Jordan in trying to resuscitate Greg. Apart from the fact that their twenty-six-year-old patient looked too young and healthy to have a heart attack from natural causes, something else seemed odd to Preciado. Initially, he thought the red blotches on the beige carpet were smudges of wet blood. But when he kneeled down on Greg’s right side, the smudges moved. He was dumbfounded. What were red rose petals doing all over the floor?
It was a scene right out of that movie American Beauty, where Kevin Spacey is lying on his back in bed, fantasizing in a dreamlike state, and red rose petals slowly float down from the ceiling and cover his body.
Jordan checked for a pulse but found none. Greg felt warm to the touch, as if he’d recently taken his last breath. Jordan took a quick scan of the bedroom, looking for clues to explain what Greg might have taken. But he saw no prescription pill vials, no syringes, no sign of illegal drug use, nothing that looked out of place, and no suicide note. He and Preciado asked Kristin if her husband had any medical problems or was taking any medications.
“Not that I know of,” she told them, though at one point she brought out a bottle of Vicodin from the bathroom.
Greg’s pupils were fixed and dilated, but Jordan was determined to make every effort to bring him back. Jordan intubated Greg, then Butler hooked up the breathing bag and rhythmically squeezed air into his lungs. The heart monitor registered a flat line. With Greg’s heart refusing to pump blood through his veins, Preciado tried but found it virtually impossible to get a needle into Greg’s right arm. Jordan had more luck with the other arm, though he had to try a couple times before he got the needle in.
Jordan tried everything in his drug box that might get Greg’s heart beating again. Atropine. Epinephrine. A pure sugar substance usually given to diabetics. And finally, 2 mg of Narcan, which reverses the
