Life after a club drug death: Heartache for family, friends

Editor's note: This story originally ran on Dec. 5, 2001 as part of the Daily Herald's "Hidden Scourge: Heroin in the Suburbs" series.

In the snapshot, 1-year-old Keith Lane peers over the top of a small shopping bag at the camera.

An inscription on the back reads, "Uncle Ron put you in a grocery bag when you were one year old and you fit! I love this picture and I love you. Love, Mom."

Keith's mom, Denise Carroll of Elgin, laughed at the image. "He was a dinka-doo," she said. "Is he a cutie or what? He's a cutie patootie."

No one would argue. Denise's only child was a cutie. For most of his toddler and preschool years, Keith stared up out of photos through big blue eyes and bangs of wavy, wild, reddish blond hair. But he would hate it if he knew his mom was showing these old baby pictures to strangers. He loved the attention but probably would turn red with embarrassment over her bragging about her amazing, talented, creative and sensitive kid.

She can't help herself. The photos, the news clippings, the Crayola artwork, the bragging - they're all that's left.

"An Elgin teen who thought he was using the club drug Ecstasy actually took a much more dangerous and lethal drug, a Kane County coroner's jury ruled," the newspaper account says. "The jury said the Feb. 5 death of 19-year-old Keith Lane...resulted from an overdose of paramethoxyamphetamine, or PMA... Lane's death is at least the fourth in the Chicago area being blamed on PMA." (A fifth person, a Rolling Meadows native, died from an Ecstasy overdose.)

All that's left.

On a charter boat fishing trip on Lake Michigan with his dad, David Lane, a still-small, school-age Keith tried to haul in a 20-pounder by himself. David Lane moved in behind his son to help pull on the rod. "Daaad, stop crowding me," Keith insisted.

The independent streak didn't always run strong. "He'd squeeze into the recliner with me since I don't know when," recalled Lane, of Elkhorn, Wis. "He never went to bed without giving me a kiss and a hug and telling me he loved me."

At about age 8 or so, Keith wrote and illustrated some of his own books. One tells the story of a powerful bike he buys for $163: "The man at the bike store said it was magic. He wasn't kidding. I could fly. Then I heard about a bike race. I wanted to be in it because I knew I could win... All the sudden my bike went up into the air. I was ahead of everybody. Then finally I saw the finish line. I was getting close to the finish line. I passed the finish line. I was the winner. Then a man gave me a trophy that said my name on it. My mom and dad were proud of me."

Denise is sitting on the floor in the apparel area of the store where she works, marking clothing, when they tell her she has a visitor. "It's probably my kid," she wisecracks to a co-worker. " 'Mom, can I have five bucks?' " Instead, she sees a boyhood friend of Keith's walking toward her.

"That was it. I just shot back up and shoved up against something and said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, something's happened to Keith. I mean my mind tried to accept it, but ignore it at the same time. I knew what I was going to hear, but I wanted it to just be that he was in a car accident... I remember looking up and I said, 'My son's dead. My son's dead. How am I going to do this? Oh my God, help me.' ...It was real cloudy and cold that day and it seemed like everything stood still."

When Keith was in middle school, he began drawing pictures of a child crying and of houses with black curtains. It was after his grandfather died and his grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. Denise Carroll was so worried she took him to see a therapist. After a month or so of visits and talks, she sensed he was doing better. They got in the car after a session one day and he popped up from the back seat to announce, "Mommy, you know what? I'm so happy!"

"You are?"

"Yeah, do you know how happy I am?"

"How happy are you?"

"I'm so happy I could go to Hawaii!"

"I want to scream and scream and scream and scream until I can't do it anymore and it just stops," Denise says. "It's really weird. It's like when you take a drink of water and you drink and you're done swallowing. That's just what happens. It's done. And then it'll leave and you'll turn and you'll find yourself smiling for a second. And then you feel guilty. How can I smile? My son is dead. I can't do that. That's not right. Why should I be happy? My son is dead. I can't understand how any parent could ever, ever, ever go on with their life... If I could, I'd still be in that bed andnever get up. This is the - worst - thing in my - whole - life," she sobs. "The worst. And the way he died and if somebody would've just made one phone call, he'd still be here. I don't understand. I don't get it."

For his 12th birthday, David Lane took Keith into a store to pick out a birthday present. Their time together was limited once he and Denise divorced after five years of marriage. Of course, Keith wanted the BB gun forbidden by his mother. "Dad, I'll never beg you for anything else," he pleaded. The gun was purchased. Tin cans were set up atop a fence in his dad's woodsy backyard and Keith quickly popped each one, complaining the cans were too easy. His dad set a golf ball-sized ball up on top of one can, figuring his son would spend hours on the target. He hit it on the secondtry.

Keith was a natural athlete from a very young age.

He ran track when he attended Prairie Middle School in Carpentersville, and placed 12th in the state in one event. "When he ran, people would say, 'Where's his feet?' because he was so fast," his mom said.

She pulled a yellowed newspaper clipping from a pile of memories. "Keith Lane pitched a complete game for the A's and recorded eight strikeouts," read the story recapping games from the Meadowdale Little League.

Keith and his dad would take each other on in basketball. David Lane, though, quickly would suggest they play "horse" because his bad back couldn't take a game full out. "Wimp," Keith teased.

"If you could erase the memories," David Lane said, "it'd be a lot easier."

"When I need to go to work in the morning, I come in and kiss his pillow and sometimes I just touch his bed or touch his pillow. 'Well, Mom's going to work, and I'll be home later.' And when I get home if I don't come up right away, I'll just yell out, 'Keith, Mom's home.' When I go grocery shopping, because he loved to eat, I'll say, 'You've got to get down here, wait until you see what I got.' The night before he died, I bought him smoked oysters. He loved smoked oysters and so did I. I bought him three things of smoked oysters and some Dinty Moore stew... I won't let anybody takethem out of the cabinet."

Keith began working out with the track team at Barrington High School, but at some point, someone showed him a gymnastics practice, and that was that.

His event was the rings. Keith won the conference championship as a freshman, an especially impressive feat because he started a few weeks behind most of his teammates, said assistant varsity gymnastics coach Terry Dieckhoff.

By his sophomore year, he had grown and developed physically so much that he made the varsity squad, Dieckhoff said. His scores dipped and rose that year, the coach said, but he once received an 8.9 for a rings performance, the highest Barrington High School had ever had.

In a home video from one meet, Keith sat nervously between teammates waiting for his turn. He scanned the gym, watching others perform and checking out the crowd when he spotted the video camera trained on him. He bugged his eyes out and smirked at it ever so slightly, but he became all business when he was lifted up to the rings. He flipped and held his teen-aged body up over them. He flopped, raised himself up on stiffened arms and slowly extended his arms out and body down into the difficult move called "the iron cross." The rings barely rocked and swayed as they had for othercompetitors trying the move.

"Look at the form," his mother bragged. "And he's pointing his toes, always pointing his toes."

Dieckhoff said Keith had tried tumbling and the high bar, and once in a while, he'd vault, but he almost hurt himself a few times and laughingly declared himself done with those. "He enjoyed control," the coach said.

"I'm going to go home and he's still not going to be there. Don't you understand? Don't you understand?" Denise asks. "This is an every day thing. This is day in and day out. Constantly thinking about him... Every time I look at a kid who looks like him... 'Are you the one who was there when he died? Why didn't you make the phone call? Why did you people let this happen to him? How could you walk away and let him lay there for three hours dead? I don't understand. All they had to do was just make a phone call and he could've been saved, but no. They saw him in distress. Gritting histeeth, shaking all over, they said, taking 15 cold showers..."

Keith quit showing up for gymnastics at the start of his junior year. He quit showing up for school. He wasn't doing well at it, and Denise constantly was having to struggle with him to go. One time, she yelled and he refused and she yelled and he refused and she yelled again. He finally got up, pounded through the house and slammed the door. A short time later, Denise went to check his room and found him hiding in it, crouched along the side of a dresser.

Eventually, gymnastics coaches got him involved in an alternative schooling program, and he studied from home. That allowed him to compete several more times with the gymnastics team, Dieckhoff said. It would have allowed him to get his diploma in a few months had he not died; to stand as part of the sea of red mortar boards and gowns with his other friends who also finished high school from home.

"With the younger kids, he was a good example of a work ethic" in the gym, Dieckhoff said. "Potentially, he could've been better than anyone we ever had. I don't know what happened outside the gym."

"Part of me wanted to go down there and hold him and part of me was like I know what dead people look like," Denise remembers. "I kissed him and it's real strange: his fingers were real pliable but his lips were hard and it was like kissing a brick wall. I wanted to hug him. I didn't say anything to anybody, but in my mind I thought, if only I could reach under there and pull him up and just hold him in my arms, but I was afraid to, you know why?

I was afraid that half his brains would fall out. I worried that if I picked him up and it was all open, how would I handle that? Oooooh, how could I bury him?"

Outside the gym, Keith rode his motorcycle. He hung out with his former girlfriend, Carpentersville resident Jasmine Martinez, 18. They went to pet stores just to look at the saltwater fish he loved. They went to The Pizza Factory restaurant and they'd eat and eat. They checked out the possibility of Keith joining the Army. He never could seem to find a job he liked for very long.

They'd hang out at his house and his mom would come talk to them until he chased her away, Martinez said. "He'd say, 'Go upstairs, Mom. You're embarrassing me.' "

When Keith and Jasmine would hang out with their group of about 20 friends, Keith played the clown.

"We'd be bored watching TV and he'd start flipping around," Martinez recalled. He'd walk around on his hands and pop and crack bones all over his body to freak them out and make them laugh. The guys in the group were bigger. They'd try to pin him down, but he'd always squirm out, she said.

The group drank alcohol when they could get it. Martinez said most of them tried Ecstasy. "We did go to a party and he was rolling," she said. "We all were. The feeling is just so sensational; like everything you touch just feels so good."

Police said "Lane went to visit some friends on the 1100 block of Chippewa Circle in Carpentersville in the afternoon of Feb. 4, a Sunday," the newspaper account reads. "While there, Lane took at least three or four pills of what he told friends was the club drug Ecstasy...

"His friends said Lane started acting unusual after taking the pills - moving around a lot, taking his clothes off and on again and again, taking at least a dozen showers and kicking walls" the clipping says.

"Lane and his friends went to sleep at some point Sunday night, but they moved him to another room by himself around 6:40 a.m. Monday because he would not settle down and they wanted to get more sleep..." it says. "When they woke up again about two hours later, at 8:50 a.m., they found their friend lying face down and unconscious in a hallway, foaming at the mouth. Lane's friends called 911 shortly after 9 a.m. and paramedics pronounced Lane dead at 9:15... A pathologist who conducted the autopsy said Lane died of PMA intoxication which caused his brain to swell and his systems to shutdown..."

Martinez says she hasn't touched Ecstasy since Keith died, but suspects some others from their group still do.

"It's scary," Martinez said. "Do you know who you're getting it from? Do you know where they're getting it from?"

Martinez broke up with Keith after six or seven months. She regrets the way she handled it. She loved him, but as a friend. He sat in the passenger seat of her car and cried, she said. Two or three months after they broke up, she came home and found a dozen roses sticking out of her mailbox with a card. "Jasmine, I only want to be with you. Love, Keith."

Now, Martinez leaves the flowers and notes for Keith and Denise at Keith's tombstone in East Dundee.

"The day of the funeral, I couldn't get out of the van. I was screaming, 'You're not making me bury my baby boy. You can't.' I didn't want to leave Keith. I kept kissing his casket and I said, 'I don't want to go.' You know, he's all alone and he's cold," Denise sobs. "I said, 'Can't somebody tell me what happened? I don't understand.' My nephew and my mother-in-law heard someone say, 'Get over it already,' because I wouldn't leave the casket. I stepped forward and I screamed, 'You're not doing this. My son's laying here. You know, it's supposed to be quiet.' And then, I myself yelledout, 'Somebody, somebody, somebody out there, you tell me what happened. What do you S.O.B.s know? Please can't somebody tell me what happened? This isn't fair.' And then next thing I know, they're dragging me away. I didn't want to be dragged away. I wanted to stay there. I should've sat there."

Denise always told Keith and his friends they could call her if ever they needed a ride. She always told Keith he could talk to her about anything, anything at all that was bothering him.

She drove him to work once and he harassed her about quitting smoking, like he often did with both his parents, even though he was smoking cigarettes himself by then.

"OK, I'll make a deal with you," he said. "You quit smoking, and I'll quit doing what I'm doing."

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"I'll quit smoking too."

"Keith, are you doing pills or something?"

"What? No."

"I love you a million, billion, trillion, zillion times more than you could ever imagine. You're my son, and I love you with all my heart. If you love me, Keith, you will never do drugs."

"Mom, I wouldn't do that."

But he did. Keith's friends told Denise he and others started trying Ecstasy occasionally about three months before he died.

One day, he took his mom up on her offer to talk. This time, he couldn't mask the trouble. He came into her room, sobbing uncontrollably. He couldn't get the words out. Whatever it is, I'll listen, she told him. We'll get through it.

He had gotten a girl pregnant; a girl he had sex with one night at a party. Denise had never heard of the girl before.

She moved to Nebraska where she now lives with Denise's six-month-old grandson, James Patrick. Side-by-side pictures of Keith and James as babies were proof enough, but a DNA test recently confirmed he is the baby's father.

At the time of his confession, Keith told his mother he would take responsibility for his child. She told him he would have to get a job and stick with it.

Now, Denise sends care packages for mother and grandson and longs for visits and photos of the only piece of Keith still living.

On that Sunday in February, an acquaintance of Keith's came by the house to pick him up. He was going to help Keith buy a car. "He stood right here, and I walked over to him and I gave him a hug and kind of kissed him on the neck and I said, 'I love you Keith' and he said, 'I love you too, Mom.'

They went to walk out the door and I said, 'You'd better behave,' and he gave me that 'Mom, give-me-a-break' look. And they were walking across the yard, talking, and I opened the door and said, 'What are you doing, talking about me?' And Keith kind of cocked his eyes back at me and he grinned really cute, like, 'Yeah, if you only knew, Mom.' And I said, 'Be careful.'

That was the last time I saw him."