(2 of 7)
Nor are there any satisfactory explanations for how Karen got into her appalling situation. She was born of unknown parents in Pennsylvania and adopted by the Quinlans when she was four weeks old. The Quinlans still think of her as a friendly, outgoing girl, a fine skier and swimmer, who occasionally picked up a few extra dollars by singing in church. Friends from Morris Catholic High School, from which Karen graduated in 1972, describe her as quiet, but popular with the boys. Her employer at a ceramics company in Ledgewood, N.J., where she was a production worker until she was laid off in a company cutback in August 1974, remembers her as a good, hard worker.
Those who knew Karen in the last few months of her active life paint a different picture. Shortly after losing her job, she moved out of her parents' home and into a world of casual employment and even more casual friendships. For a while, she shared a house on a lake with two young men; somewhere along the line, she began experimenting with drugs. Several friends describe her as an occasional marijuana user and frequent pill-popper, who took "uppers" and "downers" to suit her moods.
Drugs were probably responsible for her current condition. On April 14, apparently depressed over personal problems, she took some tranquilizers, then went to a bar to celebrate a friend's birthday. After drinking gin and tonic, she began, as one friend put it, "to nod out." Thomas French, 22, helped Karen out of the tavern, then the group took her home and put her to bed, where she passed out. When French looked in on her a few moments later, he realized that she was more than drunk. "I just looked at her and I realized she wasn't breathing," he remembers. While he attempted to revive her with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, another friend called an ambulance. But even though French and the emergency crew that rushed her to the hospital were able to get Karen breathing again, she never regained consciousness.
For a while, Karen's parents kept hoping that she would recover. As their testimony in court revealed, Mrs. Quinlan was the first to accept the inevitable, followed shortly after that by her two natural children, Mary Ellen, 19, and John, 17. But Joseph Quinlan kept talking about a miracle. His own parish priest, the Rev. Thomas Trapasso, said, "I was beginning to fear that Joe was not in touch with reality." The priest had to persuade him that Catholic theology does not require that life be preserved indefinitely by artificial and extraordinary means (see box, page 58). In early September, Quinlan testified, he gave up. "In my own mind, I had already resolved this spiritually through my prayers, and I had placed Karen's body and soul into the gentle, loving hands of the Lord...It was resolved that we would turn the machine off."