​Who’s to blame in Google exec’s overdose death?

“48 Hours” guide and Every day Beast reporter Michael Daly coated the case of Alix Tichelman, who pleaded guilty in May 2015 to prostitution and to involuntary manslaughter in Google government’s heroin overdose dying. Forrest Hayes was 51 when he was discovered lifeless on his yacht in Santa Cruz, Calif., in November 2013, after a gathering with Tichelman organized by means of an upscale courting web site.

The next commentary by Daly displays his private views. It doesn’t essentially replicate the opinion of CBS News. The article was beforehand posted in July 2016.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — The serendipity of smack might have simply as simply made Alix Tichelman the one to overdose on Forrest Hayes’ yacht. And in latest days, lengthy after the story was filed, I’ve begun to marvel what would have occurred to Forrest if he had been the one who did nothing to assist whereas someone died.

He definitely would have confronted some robust questioning by the police. However he was a household man with a giant job at Google and a lot to lose.

I’m not in any respect certain he would have ended up in jail charged with manslaughter, as Alix was.

In considering again over the occasions aboard the yacht Escape, I’ve additionally questioned why Alix was the primary to shoot up. I don’t think about that Forrest Hayes was being chivalrous, the way in which a gentleman may be on an elevator, insisting that girls go first.

A gentleman wouldn’t have paid for intercourse with a lady who was across the age of his oldest daughter.

My guess is that Forrest was nervous and wished Alix to point out it was protected. Truly, she was fortunate she went first. She may need discovered herself accused of homicide if she had given him a deadly injection with out initially subjecting herself to the identical hazard.

Within the aftermath, Santa Cruz Police Chief Steve Clark informed me that surveillance video from contained in the yacht present Alix stepping over Forrest’s physique with a wine glass in her hand.

“Glacial,” Clark referred to as her.

Clark didn’t describe the extent to which Alix had first sought to revive Forrest. He additionally didn’t point out that she stepped over him as a result of that was the one means she might go away the cabin as she fled in a panic.

That information got here from Alix after she modified her plea to responsible and acquired a sentence that may possible imply two years in jail past what she has already served whereas on remand.

Sure, Alix broke the legislation by working as a prostitute and by utilizing and offering heroin. Forrest additionally broke the legislation by patronizing a prostitute and asking her to shoot him up. A picture that retains coming again to me is Forrest reportedly using the light of his cellphone to show Alix where to inject him.

As has been extensively reported, Alix’s boyfriend had additionally died of a heroin overdose a while earlier than Forrest’s dying. In that case, she had referred to as 911 and she or he had not been held criminally chargeable for his dying.

The identical may need been true if she had simply dialed these three numbers after Forrest’s overdose. She had not even reached for a telephone.

But, once I consider Alix nonetheless sitting behind bars, I can’t assist however really feel that holding her chargeable for Forrest’s dying means giving him a go for having created the state of affairs within the first place.

He organized for her to come back to his yacht. He invited her to shoot him up. He didn’t die solely due to Alix’s indifference. On the very least, he contributed to his personal demise.

This story has turn into that uncommon one the place the extra I reported and the extra I knew, the much less certain I used to be concerning the important questions of blame and accountability.

In the end, I feel the solutions reside not in forensics, however ethics.

And that makes it your name.