An autopsy that raised more questions than answers

Did she have a mini-stroke before she crashed? Or did she have a hidden drinking and drug problem?

The autopsy of Diane Schuler, whose car crash on the Taconic Parkwaay recently killed eight, seems to point to the latter. But these "T.I.A.s" may not come up in an autopsy report, so what happened before she smashed into another car is still unknown.

Many people - including people who read this blog - have leapt to her defense, saying she didn't drink, she didn't drug. If anything, it was a T.I.A. or some other undetected medical problem.

If we can hope for anything out of this, it's the idea that her 5-year-old son, who survived the crsh, can grow up knowing that her mother didn't self-inflict this wound.

And we can also hope that she didn't have friends and family living in denial over what could have been an undetected mental and substance abuse issue. We can hope that they are simply right.

From The New York Daily News:

You wouldn't look twice at Daniel Schuler if you saw him at the gas pump, on the loading dock or in the park he polices at night as a security guard.

Yet cameras surrounded this chunky guy in rumpled khakis and a black shirt Thursday in Garden City, L.I., their long lenses pointed toward him like gun barrels, and he stared them down.

I don't know how he did it.

Here was a guy who lost his wife and daughter; his wife was being portrayed as Cruella De Vil behind the wheel, and he's being tarred as practically an accessory to murder.

Still he tried to defend his wife, Diane Schuler, who killed four children, three men and herself when she drove the wrong way on the Taconic on July 26, drunk and stoned.

And he wanted to defend himself.

"I never saw her drunk since the day I met her," Schuler said, pronouncing her as "huh," in middle Long Island fashion.

He lives just one town over in Floral Park, where things were happy once, as they can never fully be again.

"She was the perfect wife," he went on. "I'd marry her again tomorrow."

Schuler looked exhausted. Since the accident that killed his wife, their 2-year-old daughter, Erin, three nieces and three strangers, he has traveled upstate every day to the bedside of his son Bryan, 5, the only survivor.

Schuler desperately wanted to tell us, this woman you are describing, this was not my wife. You don't understand her.

There's a lot about this many of us don't understand.

Medical examiners tell us she had a 0.19 alcohol level and pot in her blood, with 6 grams of alcohol still in her stomach. Schuler tells us his wife rarely drank.

Cops tell us 911 callers reported that on Routes 17 and 87 she tailgated, angrily beeped and passed them on the shoulder before taking a wrong turn up the exit of the Taconic.

Schuler tells us she was such a devoted mother and aunt that she wanted to take all the kids in her vehicle, because she drove so slowly and carefully. She wanted to get them breakfast at McDonald's, he said.

Schuler believes so strongly that something else happened, something medical, that he's ready to take his wife's body out of the ground and have doctors look again, to try to solve the central mystery of this case.

He wants desperately to believe his wife is not to blame.

His will be a lonely fight because the evidence is against him, public opinion is against him and too many unanswered questions still swirl in the wake of one of the worst highway tragedies in the metropolitan area.

Yet, he stood there, his world in ashes around him, trying desperately to try to make sense of it.

I don't know how he did it.