--about which I haven't talked much.

I know the family (I am from Staten Island, remember, and have been heavily involved in the running community there). I also tutored this young woman's older sister for the SAT some years back.

It's a horrible situation to lose a child that young from such a bizarre cause. What was more horrible, though, was the local press coverage--since the "teen scene" on Staten Island is so heavily drug and alcohol involved, and since this young woman had been to a outdoor "party" that night, all sorts of nasty speculations went around--some still are.

If anybody had known this young woman, they would have realized that she was such a fitness obsessive that she would not have been doing the "usual" teen pharmaceuticals. But that obsessiveness may have been her undoing--she wanted very much to rise in the sport and she wanted to get a college scholarship, so she trained beyond the point of soreness and she apparently used enough of the sports cremes to produce some sort of toxic reaction.

Still, knowing the family as I do, I suspect that there is some sort of interactive effect here that the coroners might not have known to look for. I base this on the idea that there is autoimmune disease in the family (I had talked about this with Mom several times during older daughter's tutoring, as I was going through my acute stages of neuropathy). I wonder if any sort of genetic propensity might have played a part.