How Erica Buschick college freshman drank herself to death: To what degree did a college environment promote abandoned drinking and cause one girl’s death?
An incident report released last week by Ohio‘s Miami University Police Department detailing the final moments of on campus student, Erica Buschick’s before dying of an alcohol related death, have raised disturbing questions of the social conditioning of obsequious alcohol consumption at colleges.
The report comes after the Illinois native had gushed no less than two months before her drinking related death on January 20 how she longed to be a permanent college student.
Wrote the freshman on Facebook who was on her way to becoming a freshman at the Miami University in Ohio: ‘I wanna got to college for the rest of my life.’
College officials noted the 18 year old woman being discovered unresponsive in her dormitory room at Morris Hall on campus after a night of what was described as ‘high risk alcohol consumption’, notes college paper, The Miami Student,
According to the college campus police report, Buschick had consumed large quantities of champagne and vodka with friends, with the teen haven fallen multiple times (did anyone think to stop her?) before eventually being ‘escorted’ back to her room after no longer able to stand on her own two feet.
On the evening of her death, Erica Buschick had just returned to college late afternoon, after having spent her winter break at home. By 10pm that night, the freshman and her roommate began drinking alcohol, finishing off two bottles of champagne between the two of them.
The 25-page report states that Buschick and the other student then filled an empty bottle of Dasani water about halfway with vodka and made their way to a house party at a friend’s apartment off campus.
By 10.45pm, Buschick and her friend drank all of the vodka from the plastic bottle, and their friends then brought out a large bottle of high-end Grey Goose, which they said was filled with cheap vodka.
After ‘pregaming’ with the vodka, the group headed to Brick Street Bar Uptown to continue partying noted the report.
On the walk over, Buschick fell and was later deemed too drunk to enter the drinking establishment.
A friend then called the girl’s roommate, telling her that Buschick needed to be taken home.
Buschick and her roommate eventually got into a cab, returning back to their dormitory sometime after midnight.
The taxi driver who took the two women to Morris Hall later tell police that upon exiting the car, Buschick collapsed to the ground face first, leaving her with multiple scrapes.
The 18-year-old was unable to walk without assistance, so her roommate asked the taxi driver to help her to their second-floor room.
Concerned that Buschick might fall again and hit her head, the cabbie said he laid her down on a bean bag chair and told her roommate to look after her.
The roommate fell asleep at around 1am, but not before snapping a photo of Buschick on the bean bag chair, which she posted onto an Instagram account. Police would later delete the image.
When the roommate woke up the next morning, she found Buschick unresponsive, still lying on the chair in the same position as the night before, prompting her to call 911.
Just after 9am on January 20, Buschick was pronounced dead by responding police.
A report via the dailymail told of the Butler County Coroner’s office come Friday morning yet to have released a toxicology report, nevertheless investigators suggested that ‘high-risk alcohol consumption’ most likely contributed to Erica Buschick’s death.
Told Erica’s father, Eric Buschick, via the Chicago Tribune, ‘She was my baby girl,’
While the father said he didn’t want to blame anyone for his daughter’s death, he implored the university to take future steps to make sure that what happened to his daughter would not happen to anyone else.
Miami University President Gregory Crawford said in a statement that he will undertake a ‘holistic assessment’ of the school’s effort to curtail binge-drinking among students.
To date, the educator had failed to offer concrete directives as to how to assail the unbridled drinking that presumably takes place at Ohio’s Miami University.
According to her father, helping people with developmental disables had been Erica’s passion from the time she was a student at Warren Township High School, from which she graduated as a member of the National Honor Society.
When she entered Miami University last fall, the girl declared special education as her major and joined a local chapter of Best Buddies – a volunteer organization helping people with intellectual disabilities. Never mind her own disabilities/proclivities and addiction.
Of question is if Erica had ever taken to binge drinking previously and to what degree the social attitude at college informed her that such unabashed drinking was permissible and par for the course?
