Alcohol Related Deaths

Too many teens and young people that think alcohol is nothing but fun and for many can be can escape from real life. But when you are able to step back and look at all of the alcohol related deaths, your opinion can change quickly. When you look deeper into drinking, you see the possibilities of a car accident, overdosing, and even suicide. Young people wonder why the drinking age in the US is 21 and many tend to not follow the law. You are permitted to drink once you are of age, and looking at a few horror stories the reason why is made more and more clear.

For many young people, going to college can be an invitation to drink. According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, about 1,400 college students that are between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol related accidents every year. Samantha Spady, a student at Colorado State University, is an example of how binge drinking can kill. Sam was not only the captain of the cheerleading squad but she also was class president, an honor student, and homecoming queen. She was a smart beautiful girl who had goals and dreams after college. Unfortunately her life was cut short because of one bad decision.

Colorado State University and University of Colorado at Boulder have an annual rivalry football game against each other. It is the biggest social event for both schools. During this event, Sam consumed between 30 and 40 beers and shots over an 11-hour period of time. She eventually passed out and her friends brought her up to a bedroom in the fraternity house where they were partying. They thought she just needed to sleep it off. The next morning, a member of the fraternity found her dead while he was giving a tour of the house.

Corey Domingue was a child any parent would hope to raise. He was a football player as well as an honor roll student in high school and was majoring in chemical engineering at Louisiana State University. He had talked to his sister about her drinking problem but never considered a dose of his own advice. Corey liked to drink but alcoholism in his family didn't effect his decisions.

One night, Corey and a few of his friends bought a few bottles of liquor and were ready to drink. Not long after midnight, Corey's friends were helping him into the bathroom where he proceeded to finish off a bottle of rum. His friends thought that he just needed to sleep it off and that he would be fine in the morning. They were very wrong. A few hours later, Corey's friends heard him making noises from the bathroom. They soon realized that Corey couldn't breathe and called 911. Corey was dying on the bathroom floor of his apartment. CPR was preformed on Corey until the paramedics arrived. Once at the hospital, Corey was pronounced dead. When Corey overdosed, his blood alcohol content was 0.43 percent. To humans, that high of a BAC is lethal. When you have that much alcohol in your body, it starts effecting more then just your liver. Corey's brain wasn't functioning properly and he wasn't able to breathe.

The past two stories have involved college students binge drinking. The next will put in perspective another kind of story, a story that involves not only binge drinking but also adults supplying alcohol to a child who was only 13 years old. Brenda Nguyen died from alcohol poisoning. Adults she hardly knew supplied the alcohol that she consumed. She had run away from her home in Phoenix, Arizona and met two boys named Armando Hernandez and Clayton Koepke, both age 18. They brought Brenda to Armando's mother Ana and her boyfriend's house. The two boys supplied alcohol for Brenda to drink because Clayton wanted to have sex with her. Brenda ended up drinking an entire fifth of vodka in a 30-minute period of time. Not long after she had finished it, she started having difficulty breathing and was having seizures. Although the adults in the house tried to assist the young girl, they did not inform the paramedics. In the morning, Brenda was dead. Clayton, Armando, and his mother dumped her body by an Indian School in Phoenix. Everyone involved that night was arrested for suspicion of felony child abuse. Armando and Clayton were also charged with concealing and transporting a body.

These stories have been about binge drinking in a wide range of age groups. The next is about a 16-year old girl named Julia Gonzalez who overdosed