Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  The staff agreed to make an exception and allowed her to call Austin and Layne. “Her thing was ‘I’ve got to apologize to my mom and Layne. I’ve got to tell them I’m sorry. I’ve got to tell them that I love them. I’ll stay. I’ll stay and be a good person, if you just let me say I’m sorry.’”

  She didn’t get through to either of them. Austin’s bedroom phone was still disconnected from the intervention, and Layne was probably exhausted from his return trip from Germany. Demri checked herself out after a few hours. According to Austin, Demri went to rehab two more times, staying the longest at the Sundown M Ranch, which she left a few days before graduation. “She actually got kicked out of there for talking to people,” Austin said. “She did well there.” This was the only treatment Austin paid for herself. She said she would not be surprised if the others were paid for either by Layne, his management, or his record label.

  Demri’s health began taking a turn for the worse around Thanksgiving of 1993. She told her mother she had been having fevers in excess of a hundred degrees. Austin told Demri the next time it happened, she should go to the hospital. The first of many hospitalizations happened shortly after. “She came in to the hospital for the first time at the end of November of ’93. She was in until January of ’94. She got out [and] was back in in March of ’94 and at that time put on life support,” Austin recalled. “When she would be in, she would come in to the emergency room. They would admit her up into a medicine floor; then she’d go from the medicine floor to the [Intensive Care Unit] and life support, and then she wouldn’t die. So she’d go back to the medicine floor—she’d be on IV and antibiotics for a month. This went on and on and on. She had her lungs operated on twice. She had her heart operated on twice. She suffered miserably.”

  While in the ICU, Austin said Demri was conscious but intubated—she had a tube inserted down her throat to help her breathe, which she despised. She would tell her mother, “I hate being fucking intubated. I can’t talk, and these people come and they ask me these fucking questions, and I can’t fucking talk, and I feel like a fucking fish in a fucking fishbowl.” She communicated by writing on a small blackboard with a piece of chalk.

  Demri visited Bad Animals Studio a few times during the Alice in Chains sessions, Sam Hofstedt recalled. “She did not look good. She was like so, so, so skinny. And I think at one point during the record, she was actually in the hospital, and she survived, but at one point they said all her organs pretty much shut down for a little while. She was knocking at death’s door.”

  Despite the multiple hospitalizations and brushes with death, Demri continued using drugs. She had seemingly accepted that her addiction was going to kill her. One weekend, Demri was visiting her mother. After the visit, Austin was driving Demri back to Seattle when another car cut her off on the freeway.

  “God, Mom! I hate you driving on this freeway every day. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t know what I’d do,” Demri said after the shock wore off. And then she said, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m going to die before you do.”

  Austin turned to her and said, “Oh, okay. You love me so much, you’re going to have me bury you? Do you have any idea what that would do to me?”

  Demri was silent and then responded, “Well, I never really thought about it that way, but I know that I’ll be dead before you. I’ll be dead before I’m thirty.” She was right.

  According to Austin, while Demri and Layne’s relationship might have been over, they still cared for each other. “Demri was sick and dying for those last two and a half years. Layne would come and stay with her in the hospital at night.” Austin worked at Harborview Medical Center, where Demri was a patient, and would let Layne in the building with her pass. He would spend the night and leave the hospital in the anonymity of the early hours of the morning. Susan also visited Demri while she was hospitalized.

  * * *

  Russell—a pseudonym—is a foreign-born musician who came to Seattle in 1996.2 He overstayed his visa and remained in Seattle, living and working as an undocumented immigrant, doing a variety of jobs to pay his part of the rent on a downtown apartment. He was dealing heroin to make extra money on the side and occasionally used some himself.

  One night in May or June 1996, a group of people came over to his apartment to hang out, Demri being one of them. Demri and Russell hit it off and began hanging out as friends. She eventually asked if she could stay at his place for a while. Russell agreed, and she crashed at his apartment off and on for about six to eight weeks that summer. Demri didn’t have much in terms of possessions, only a few small suitcases carrying her clothes and some books. Sometimes she would visit her mother or a friend for a few days and come back.

  “A lot of my friends that I sort of knew in Seattle I wasn’t hanging around with for various reasons,” Russell said of the time he met Demri. “It was good to have a friend. So we went out to bars and [to see] rock bands—it was good to have a friend to hang out with.”

  According to Russell, Demri told Layne “I’m staying with this guy. He’s a musician and he’s really nice, blah, blah, blah.” Although Russell was a heroin dealer, Layne was not one of his buyers. Layne was not happy about the arrangement. He called Russell’s apartment and left messages on the answering machine with comments like, “You’re not a musician—you’re a drug dealer.”

  “I didn’t have a very good impression of Layne,” Russell said. “Every time I’d sort of say, ‘He’s an asshole,’ she would always stick up for him.” Demri told him they had met in high school—a story Russell did not know to be false until he was interviewed for this book fifteen years later. Russell did not recall if Demri ever told him why they broke up. He remembers her saying when Layne got rich and famous, he started hanging around prostitutes, but he doesn’t know if this is true or not.

  Demri told Russell she was going to Layne’s home once a week to clean the place up. She told him Layne had gotten very paranoid about people coming over at all hours of the day and night and that he had set up a security camera outside his door and wouldn’t let anyone in unless he wanted to see them. Both Michelle Ahern-Crane and Jon Wiederhorn remember that Layne complained about random people coming over and was very conscious about his security.3

  Whether Demri was going there to clean or for a tryst or to get high or some combination of the three, Russell doesn’t know. He does say that every time she came back from Layne’s, she brought cocaine that he had given her. Russell started using cocaine after Demri shared some.

  Demri told Russell about her health problems—that she had bacterial endocarditis and that her heart valves had been replaced. She showed him the foot-long scar going up the center of her rib cage. Russell was worried about her continued use of cocaine. He told her, “I don’t care about heroin and stuff—I’ll give it to you. You don’t have to worry about it. But why do you have to do coke? It’s bad for your heart.” Russell got the impression that “she was sort of feeling resigned that it was going to kill her anyway.”

  At one point that summer, James Burdyshaw ran into Demri while riding on a bus near Pioneer Square. “Hey, how’s it going?” Demri asked Burdyshaw, whom she hadn’t seen in several years. Burdyshaw was dismayed at the sight of his friend. “What made her look older was she was skinny, really skinny. Her face was kind of sunken in. She used to be really fresh-faced, really kind of full-faced.” He could see her bones through her skin. She showed him the scar on her chest, telling him it was from when doctors had to massage her heart and that she almost died. It was the last time Burdyshaw saw her.

  Demri had been gone for several days and Russell hadn’t heard from her, so he called Austin’s home because he was worried and thought she might be there. She wasn’t, Austin told him. When Demri finally came back to Russell’s apartment, she was livid. “What are you doing trying to check up on me? I don’t want you ringing my mom’s house!”

  Russell was developing a cocaine addiction, which affected his ability to ma
ke ends meet. He applied to go to a rehab clinic in California in early August 1996. “I used to only ever use heroin, and it wasn’t until I met Demri that I started using coke, and I think that’s what actually drove me to rehab, so it was probably meeting Demri that saved my life,” he said.

  By late August, Russell was getting ready to leave. Demri had left a suitcase in his room, and he unsuccessfully tried to get ahold of her to tell her he was leaving and still had some of her stuff. “I can only assume she went back and got it once I left. I don’t know.” He thinks the last time he saw Demri would have been in August 1996 before he left for California. In retrospect, he said it was a bit upsetting he never had the opportunity to say good-bye to her.

  Not long before her death, Demri had checked out of a hospital and spent about a month in a nursing home, where most of the patients were senior citizens. “She had these little old people doing tricks for her,” Austin recalled. While she visited one day, an older woman with no teeth came up to Demri and said something to her.

  “Hey, I’m talking to my mom right now. But I’ll talk to you after a while. Show my mom one of your tricks.” At that point, Austin said, “She took her tongue and stuck it out between her eyes. Dem cracks up, and I cracked up, and this lady cracked up.”

  Another patient, who had been a prominent architect in Seattle decades earlier, took off one night in his motorized wheelchair after taking his medication. He went into a Red Apple supermarket to buy donuts, soda, and potato chips. On his way back, he crashed his wheelchair and broke his glasses. When they took him in after the accident, he said, “I’m going to have a party with Demri—leave me alone!”

  At some point in October 1996, Mike Starr and Jason Buttino were walking into Harborview Medical Center when they saw Demri walking out. According to Buttino, she came over to say hello, and they talked for a few minutes before going their separate ways. That was the last time they saw her. Austin did not dispute this account, noting it would not have been unusual to see her at Harborview. “She lived there two and a half years, and I worked there, so she was in and out.”

  About a week before her death, Demri went over to Austin’s apartment and brought her a card. She spoke to her mother’s roommate, Sam, whispering something to him, which Austin could not hear. She assumed it was about his eleven-year-old daughter, who was missing at the time and was later found murdered by a serial killer. It was the last time she saw Demri alive.

  After Demri left, Austin asked, “What did Dem want?”

  “Oh, I’ll tell you later,” was his response. Austin didn’t want to push it and dropped the subject. After Demri’s death, Sam revealed to Austin the subject of that conversation, saying, “She told me something was going to happen. She didn’t know when, but it was going to happen, and I needed to be here because you were going to need me.”

  “Dem knew,” Austin said in retrospect. “Before she died, she was reaching out and touching base with people, and after she died, she was reaching out and touching base with people.”

  During her final days, Demri was staying with an older man, the father of a friend of hers, at his place in Bothell. Demri had lived something of a nomadic existence, staying with different people for periods of a few days to a few weeks at a time. Toward the end of her life, it became very difficult for her to find a place to stay. “People were afraid to have Dem stay with them, because no one wanted her to die at their house,” Austin explained.

  Austin alleges that the older man was isolating Demri, keeping her away from people to the point where nobody, including Austin, was able to contact her. At one point, Austin called and told him, “I want to talk to my daughter.” He made up some excuse why she couldn’t. Austin wasn’t having any of it. “If I don’t hear from my daughter within the next twenty minutes, I’m going to call the police, and we are going to show up at your door.”

  “Well, I’ll see if I can wake her up,” he replied. Demri called her shortly after.

  On the afternoon of October 28, 1996, the older man drove Demri into Seattle. She told him she wanted a few things from a Fred Meyer grocery store. When he arrived at the store, Demri was unconscious, and he couldn’t wake her. He went into the store to pick up her things, leaving the car engine running so she wouldn’t get cold. He came out of the store, drove home, and still couldn’t wake her. He left her in the car unconscious so he could do his laundry. He eventually realized something was seriously wrong. He drove to the home of Jim and Marlene—two of Austin’s patients—freaking out, saying, “She’s dead! She’s dead! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

  Jim checked on Demri and felt a slight pulse. He got in the driver’s seat and told Marlene and the older man to follow him in another car while he drove to the hospital. Demri was eventually brought in to the emergency room at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland at 7:30 P.M.—two and a half hours after she first lost consciousness.

  Austin got a phone call from the hospital, telling her Demri was there. They told her that the older man—whom Austin said they erroneously identified to her in the phone call and in the medical examiner’s report as Demri’s boyfriend—had brought her to the emergency room. By the time she got there, the man had left the hospital. Eventually, he called Austin on the phone and filled her in on what happened that afternoon. Austin was dismayed. “I think, ‘What a dumb fuck. Why didn’t you take her to the hospital when you couldn’t wake her up?’”

  Austin’s sister, Patricia Dean Austin, arrived at the hospital shortly after. At this point, Demri was still alive but unconscious. Kathleen asked the doctors if Demri could hear her. The doctors told her they thought she could. She clutched Demri’s hand and said, “Dem, if you have a choice to stay or to go, you don’t have to stay for me anymore.” During previous hospitalizations, she had always told her to fight, to survive. This time was different. “That was the only time that I ever gave her permission to go.” She found out later that Patricia had told Demri essentially the same thing. They stayed with Demri through the night, leaving only to get some sleep. Early the next morning, Patricia and Kathleen Austin walked into the room where Demri was. Kathleen turned to look at her sister, who immediately feared the worst.

  “Oh my God, she’s gone,” Patricia said.

  Kathleen went over to Demri, touched her face, and saw that her chest was moving. “I said, ‘Oh, her chest is moving.’ Then I said, ‘No, no. That’s the machine. She’s gone.’ I don’t know how to describe nothing, that feeling of nothing. The night before, I felt her presence.

  “I believe she passed away when I went to sleep. She knew my family would be there in the morning. She knew my sister was there. She knew I wasn’t going to be alone. She knew I was okay, and I gave her permission to go. So when I went to sleep, she passed away.”

  Demri was still on life support, but she was gone. After being with her a few minutes, Kathleen and Patricia left the room. The doctors came a few minutes later and asked her if she wanted to be present when they disconnected Demri from life support.

  “There’s no reason for me to be there. My daughter’s already gone,” Kathleen responded.

  A doctor came back and confirmed Austin’s conclusion that the life support equipment was keeping her alive. It was 7:40 A.M.—twelve hours after Demri was first admitted in the emergency room. She was twenty-seven years old. A coroner concluded that she died of acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of opiate, meprobamate, and butalbital.4

  Jim Elmer got a phone call from Austin that morning, informing him Demri had passed. “I went over to Evergreen and gave her a kiss on the forehead good-bye, and she was looking very peaceful,” he recalled. He spoke with Demri’s family before leaving. He touched base with Susan, and the two agreed to go see Layne. He had already heard the bad news. By the time they got to his home, Layne was waiting for Mark Lanegan, who arrived a few minutes after them. “Layne obviously knew what had happened and was distraught and so forth, and while they had a very dynamic relat
ionship, they certainly cared about each other and loved each other. So Susan and I said our good-byes and so Mark stayed with Layne and that was the best thing to do.” This visit was one of the last times Susan saw him.5

  She invited Jim to lunch so they could speak privately. She took him to the Ruins, a private club and restaurant in Seattle. She suggested he become a member, which he did. They would meet again at this venue in similar circumstances a few years later.

  Demri’s death devastated Layne. Austin thinks it weighed on him heavily: she heard Layne had told somebody, “I should have got us out of here. I had the money. I could have done it. I should have gotten us out of here.” Austin defined the phrase “out of here” as meaning, “Out of Seattle, away from all the people knocking on the door wanting to get him high.” Jim Elmer agreed that Layne had the resources to do it if he had been serious about it, but he never did.

  A few months after Demri’s death, Layne asked Austin for the teddy bear Demri had had with her in the hospital and a few other things. They set up a time for Austin to meet at his condo in the U District. Austin arrived and repeatedly rang the doorbell and got no answer. She went back to her car, waited for about half an hour, and tried again. Still no answer. Austin went home. She got a phone call from Layne at ten o’clock that night, asking why she hadn’t shown up. Austin told him she had been there at the scheduled time, to which Layne responded that he had had to go out.

  Austin suspected he was out getting drugs. She ran into him by accident on Broadway a few weeks later and still had Demri’s teddy bear and other things in the trunk of her car. They made the exchange at that point. This was the last time Austin saw him. The general consensus from people who knew Layne well is that he never got over Demri’s death. “Layne never recovered from losing her,” Austin said. Jim Elmer agreed.

  “I know how much he loved Demri, and I can only imagine that that really just obliterated him,” Nick Pollock said.