Daughter’s one-dose ecstasy death spurs parents to publicize dangers

FORT WORTH, Texas ― Jessica Mary Hunter made two significant choices in life, her father said.

The latter killed her.

“Her first choice was accepting Jesus Christ,” her father Alan Hunter said, tears welling up in his eyes. “And her second was to take this drug.”

Jessica, 21, died on Oct. 8, three days after taking Ecstasy with friends at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. It was the first time she had taken the party drug, friends said.

Weeks after their daughter’s death, her parents remain dumbfounded over her taking Ecstasy. But they refuse to let their daughter’s death be forgotten and plan to mount an awareness campaign about the dangers of the drug, which is also called “Molly.”

Jessica had recently transferred from Austin Community College to Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where she was a marketing major. She was already a member of the “Bobcat Ice Babes,” a student organization that supports and markets the school’s hockey team.

Her parents had started helping her set up her apartment the week before the festival.

On Oct. 4, the day before she took Ecstasy, she texted her parents: “It’s beautiful here today.” She sent her mom, Debbie Hunter, a photo of her newly braided hair.

It was the following night when she made her fatal decision.

After taking the drug she had a seizure on the sidewalk while waiting on a pedicab. Other friends took Ecstasy as well; one made himself throw up because he didn’t “feel right,” Jessica’s parents were told. But Jessica always hated throwing up. It scared her, her parents said.

She went into cardiac arrest as she lay on the sidewalk, and paramedics performed CPR for eight minutes, her parents were told. She was rushed to Seton Medical Center Austin.

Alan and Debbie Hunter were asleep in their home when the doorbell rang at 5 a.m. on Oct. 6. Alan Hunter peered through the blinds and saw police lights flashing back at him.

“As soon as we saw them ― we knew it was bad,” Debbie Hunter said.

The officer told them their daughter was in the hospital, but he didn’t say much more.

They checked their cellphones and found messages from their daughter’s best friend, Madison “Madi” Wimmer, who had gotten up in the middle of the night when she learned the news and drove from San Marcos to stay with her.

They quickly got on the road to Austin, arriving at the intensive care unit just before 9 a.m., finding their only child surrounded by four health-care workers and two chaplains.

“That’s about the scariest thing you can see,” Alan Hunter said.

Jessica was in an induced coma as the hospital staff tried to keep her body cold. Her temperature had spiked to 41 degrees Celsius at one point, her parents said.

For two days they watched their daughter deteriorate. She bled from her nose and mouth, they said. They were awakened at 3 a.m. on Oct. 8 to the news that a CT scan showed brain hemorrhaging.

“Her eyes were open ― you could see that there was nothing there,” her mom said.

They directed the hospital staff to remove her ventilator and unplug all the machines that had kept her barely alive for the past three days, and at 5:25 a.m., they watched their daughter slip away.

“We gathered around her bed and prayed,” her father said. “We started this new journey we are on now.”

“If God would have told us before she was born that we’d only have her for 21 years, we would have said, ‘Please give her to us,’” Alan Hunter said.

As a youth Jessica was in choir, art and debate. She was demonstrative and creative, but was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), Alan Hunter said.

Alan Hunter said his daughter had stopped taking her prescription medication for ADHD a while back because she didn’t like the way it made her feel. He thinks her tendency to make quick decisions could be why she took Ecstasy on the spur of the moment.

The toxicology reports on Jessica Hunter’s death were not yet available at the time of this article.

Ecstasy has been popular as a club and party drug since the 1980s and can be deadly for a variety of reasons. One of the problems is that it is viewed by young adults as a safe, make-you-feel happy drug.

But if the person is taking other medications, the interaction with Ecstasy can be fatal, or sometimes people have undiagnosed heart problems that can lead to death, said Dr. Terence McCarthy, the vice chief of staff at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth.

But most likely, death comes because the drug is unregulated, McCarthy said.

Known in the pharmaceutical world as MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), it was legal before being banned in 1985 because of safety concerns. The drug sold on the streets rarely contains MDMA; it is made up of ketamine, caffeine and other narcotics and stimulants, according to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“You never know if one capsule is 10 times more concentrated than another capsule,” McCarthy said. “So it really is always a game of Russian roulette.”

Ecstasy causes the brain to release large amounts of dopamine and serotonin, which is why people feel euphoric when they take it, McCarthy said. But it also causes the body to go into overdrive, he said.

“You have an increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, you lose thermal regulation ― the body’s ability to regulate temperature ― and it makes your body more prone to experience cardiac arrhythmia, which can be lethal,” McCarthy said.

Since her daughter’s death, Debbie Hunter has been looking over poems her daughter wrote.

In one from 10 years ago, called Life, Jessica wrote:

... We all come on earth to do something spectacular. And we all leave this earth a better place to stay. We might be leaving loved ones that will miss us very much. But when we get up to heaven, there will be people waiting for us ...

“She was pretty prolific for her age,” her mother said.

Over the coming weeks Alan Hunter will focus on everything that he and his wife went through when their daughter died. The things they saw. The way they felt. He and his wife want to be completely transparent and share their feelings ― and their knowledge about Ecstasy ― with high school seniors and college students.

He’s writing it all down, laminating poster boards that friends signed at her funeral, which was held at the same church where she was baptized. More than 500 people attended.

He also spoke to officials in Austin about doing public service announcements at next year’s music festival.

“We are trying to get as much good out of this as we can,” her father said. “I want people to know that she was real. Maybe if they can make the connection. If we can just stop one from making the same choice.”

That’s the only thing that gives him hope.

“Now our future is in heaven,” he said. “It is not here on this world.”

By Monica S. Nagy

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

(MCT Information Services)