The investigator hired by the family of Taconic wrong-way driver Diane Schuler has split with them and says he found nothing to contradict an autopsy report she was drunk and high. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Funk Flex
“Absent any other investigative knowledge or medical determination there is nothing to counteract the Westchester medical examiner’s findings,” investigator Tom Ruskin said Wednesday.
Toxicology tests showed that Schuler had guzzled the equivalent of 10 shots of vodka and smoked marijuana before driving the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway in July 2009.
She collided head-on with another car, killing herself, her daughter and three nieces and three passengers in the other vehicle.
Ruskin was hired by Schuler’s husband, Daniel, who has always insisted his wife wasn’t a drinker and was sober when he left her at an upstate campsite not long before the fatal wreck.
Ruskin, of CMP Group Investigations, said has not been in contact with Daniel Schuler or his lawyer, Dominic Barbara, since they decided to participate in an HBO documentary that would involve exhuming Diane’s body.
“We were never consulted,” Ruskin said. “It came as a surprise to me and my firm and my investigators that this was being done.”
Barbara did not return a call for comment.
Ruskin said the traumatic case raised many questions that he feels can never be answered.
“You want the answer to these things. The public wants the answer. Why does a mother do this with her kids present? That why may never be answered,” he said.
“This is a story that has kept me up, kept my investigators up, it has eaten at everyone involved in it,” he said.
