Page 2 of 4
So they tried to dissuade Steven. They hoped that testing positive for pot would keep Steven home; it didn't. One recruiter, Lipford claims, even told Steven "the Iraq thing would be over before you even finish boot camp."
Steven wouldn't budge. He enlisted Oct. 17, 2002, and only informed the family afterward. In the Army he met Spc. Virginia Downs and married her, just one day shy of his three-year anniversary in the Army. Lipford and her husband weren't in favor of Steven getting married. "He was 20 years old -- far too young," she says.
Just three months later, the couple headed to Iraq. The whole family -- siblings and parents -- drove to Fort Benning to see Steven one last time. Lipford still remembers that final hug. As they were leaving, Lipford made her husband stop the car to hold him one more time.
"I ran back, and I grabbed him ... I held him and I closed my eyes. And I asked God not to let me forget what that felt like," she says. "I held him as tight as I could, and he said, 'Mom, you've got to go, you've got to go.' I said, 'I know honey. I know but I love you so much.' And he was crying."
She got back in car and told her husband and daughter Lori that Steven was never coming home. Recalling this, her voice trails off, "Why didn't I ..."
The days after Virginia Sirko's phone call were a blur. Steven arrived at Charlotte Douglas International Airport at about 4:30 p.m. on April 21, 2005. The plane sat on the tarmac until after dark, when airline personnel removed Steven's body from the cargo hold.
"There's a lot that I don't remember, for days," says Lipford, sitting in the living room of her home in a historic section of Statesville. She'd "almost" quit smoking before Steven died; now she lights one Marlboro Light after another.
Ten days after the funeral in Statesville, an agent from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division sat on Lipford's couch and told her -- though the autopsy wasn't yet complete -- that Steven had died from an apparently self-inflicted drug overdose. That wasn't possible, she said -- Steven didn't use drugs.
She then listened as the agent said medics had killed themselves with overdoses before -- not because they wanted to die but because they wanted to relieve the pain of what they had witnessed. "And they said, 'Mrs. Lipford, this is something that you're going to have to live with.' And I said, 'This is something that I will never accept,'" she recalls.
Later, when she finally obtained a copy of preliminary autopsy results, she felt vindicated: No drugs were detected in Steven's body. Steven had not died of natural causes, and suicide had been ruled out.
What, then, happened? The only drug found near Steven (one report indicated investigators found it in his room; another indicated it was not) was vecuronium. The neuromuscular blocker is a powerful paralytic that has no recreational value, says Maryann Oertel, a pharmacist in the drug information center at University of North Carolina Hospitals.
A medic would have known many drugs that offered a much easier death -- vecuronium has no sedative properties and would cause asphyxiation while its recipient was totally conscious. "Basically what occurs is you have respiratory paralysis ... which leads to cardiovascular collapse and, in the end, respiratory arrest," said a poison information provider at the Carolinas Poison Center.
Steven's widow told Lipford that toxicology reports wouldn't detect vecuronium. The military, however, did devise a screening and determined that yes, Steven did have the drug in his body when he died. "He died a very painful death," Lipford says. "He was completely conscious."
The next question, then, was why? That has never been answered. Lipford has struggled for answers. Her son's widow, however, has tried to move on. According to Lipford, Virginia Sirko quit talking to the family after Lipford told her that the Army had developed a way to screen for vecuronium. Sirko has no listed phone number, and attempts to reach her through relatives were unsuccessful. She refused a letter sent to her Elizabethtown, Ky., address. It was returned unopened.
The Army's investigation ultimately ended with the finding that Steven died of accidental poisoning. Summer Lipford has her own theory: She believes that Steven asked someone for medicine to help with pain -- say, from an old rotator cuff injury -- and instead the person intentionally gave Steven vecuronium. Lipford's now turning to Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Indiana, whom she says have expressed interest in getting her son's case reopened.