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As David DeRosia headed out the door to the Woodstock '99 concert, he said, 'Don't worry, Mom.'
His mother, Lorelei Johnson, had cause to worry. Her son was her primary caretaker. She had suffered debilitating effects of Lyme disease for years, including muscle weakness and intermittent blindness, according to a deposition she later gave. She had started building an addition on her house for David to live in.
'David was going to take care of me,' Johnson said in the deposition. 'He didn't want me going into a home.'
Three days after leaving his Connecticut home for Rome, DeRosia, 24, collapsed at the concert and died from heat stroke. His body temperature had soared to 107 degrees.Today, 10 years after DeRosia's death, his mother and a Syracuse lawyer continue to pursue a lawsuit filed in 2001 in state Supreme Court against concert promoters and six doctors who worked the four-day concert. The lawyer, Joseph Cote, is preparing to ask a judge to let him depose a doctor who helped treat DeRosia that hot July night; the doctor now lives in Switzerland.
'Absolutely needless death'
DeRosia died because Woodstock'99 promoters and the doctors were negligent, the lawyer charges. Promoters didn't provide enough fresh water and had inadequate medical care for the 200,000 fans, Cote said. Doctors and nurses didn't have medical thermometers immediately available, he said, despite the fact that temperatures and humidity soared during the festival.
» Glenn Coin talks to Woodstock co-producer Michael Lang about the festival and his new book, 'The Road to Woodstock'
» Mark Bialczak talked to several local bands about what it was like to play the festival
» Former Syracuse Newspapers columnist Marie Villari recalls Woodstock 1969, 1994 and 1999 in an audio slideshow, 'By The Time I Got to Woodstock'
» View a gallery of photos from Woodstock 1999
» We pose to you, 20 Questions: Woodstock edition; e-mail your memories to features@syracuse.com
» Read the highlights of The Post-Standard's coverage from July 1999
» Test your knowledge of the money and the mayhem of Woodstock '99 with our By the Numbers feature
» Four Post-Standard reporters share what it was like to cover the festival
» Memorable quotes, headlines, and T-shirt sayings from Woodstock 1999
'(DeRosia) died as result of being overheated at this concert without any adequate plan by concert promoters to deal with overheated patients,' Cote said. 'This was an absolutely needless death because rank amateurs were running a mass event.'
The festival's medical director said otherwise. In an interview with police shortly after DeRosia's death, Richard Goldman told police that Woodstock '99 had hired highly qualified doctors, set up 10 medical tents and a 72-bed portable hospital and did everything they could to provide water and medical care.
As temperatures and humidity stayed high, promoters urged concert-goers to wear hats and sunscreen and drink plenty of water.
'We're dealing with it by getting a lot more water out to the outposted medical tents, ' said one of the promoters, Michael Lang, on the first day of the festival. 'We're getting Gatorade to the tents, and we've opened a secondary cool-down facility.'
Lawyers for the doctors either could not be reached or did not return phone calls.
A lawyer for the promoters, Michael Lang and John Scher, could not be reached. Lang and Scher each gave extensive depositions, but a judge has sealed all evidence obtained from Lang and Scher, including those depositions.
'I told him ... to be safe'
David Keith DeRosia was the kind of person who 'went out of his way to help anybody with anything,' his mother recalled in her deposition.
'I got called to the school because the teacher sent kids out to step on the caterpillars,' Johnson recalled. '(David) was hysterical. I had to take him home.'
At the time of his death, DeRosia was earning $35,000 as associate desktop support employee for Cendant Mobility, in Danbury, Conn. He paid his mother $500 a month rent, she said in her deposition, and drove her to doctors' appointments, mowed the lawn and carried in the groceries.
By the time her son left for Woodstock '99, Johnson said, she had been suffering from Lyme disease for 12 years.
'I don't know if I'm going to be able to walk, talk, breathe, swallow or see,' she said. 'They come and go.'
Johnson said she had told David and her daughter to put her in a nursing home if her health deteriorated. David wouldn't hear of it, she said.
DeRosia was a big music fan, and he decided to go to the concert in July 1999 with several friends. Late at night on Thursday, July 22, DeRosia piled in a car with a trio of brothers -- David, Rob and Bryan Vadnais -- and Bryan's girlfriend. They arrived in Rome about 6 a.m. Friday.
'I said goodbye to him as he was leaving and hugged him and kissed him, as I always did,' his mother recalled. 'I told him, you know, to be safe.'
'I'm going to the pit'
Over the next two days, DeRosia kept a journal of his experiences at Woodstock'99. On five pages of a spiral notebook, he logged the number of topless women (too many to count by Friday night), his mostly unsuccessful efforts to sleep amid the noise and chaos, and reviews of bands he watched Friday and Saturday.
He was particularly excited about the Saturday night lineup: hard rock bands Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica. Just before midnight Friday, he wrote in his journal: 'Tomorrow's goal: Get on the Woodstock video by being in the Metallica pit. ROCK ON!!'
The 'pit' was the mosh pit, the area nearest the stage where fans, mostly young men, danced crazily and crashed into each other. The pit in front of the main Woodstock '99 stage consisted of thousands of people, many covered in mud.
In his journals and to his friends, DeRosia never complained of the heat or a lack of water. In a statement to police just after the concert, one of his friends, David Vadnais, said water was never a problem. When they ran out, Vadnais said, one of the group would go buy some more. Vadnais estimated they each spent $60 to $80 in bottled water, at $4 a bottle.
'David had enough money to purchase all of the water he needed,' Vadnais told police. 'David showed no signs of heat exhaustion Saturday night, to the best of my knowledge.'
DeRosia and his friends saw several concerts Saturday afternoon, then returned to their tents for a couple of hours of rest before the big Saturday night lineup. While they rested, DeRosia penned his last journal entry: 'Now to build up strength, because I'm going to the pit.'
'Agitated and uncooperative'
Temperatures and the humidity hit the high 80s on that Saturday (July 24, 1999). On the concrete tarmac and in the mosh pit, the temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees higher.
That night, the two medical tents near the main stage treated 125 patients per hour. The tents were chaotic; logs show that at least 40 patients were seen in the main medical center between midnight and 2 a.m.
About 12:40 a.m. Sunday, a golf cart pulled up to the auxiliary medical tent near the main stage, Tent No. 3, carrying a young, obese white male having seizures who had collapsed in the mosh pit. He was agitated and confused, and doctors at first suspected a drug overdose. They were able to determine his name was David DeRosia.
They couldn't take his core body temperature because there was no core thermometer, statements by a doctors and a nurse revealed. And they couldn't take his temperature with an oral thermometer because he was thrashing too much.
The medical crew had difficulty getting an intravenous tube in because DeRosia was swinging his arms, recalled the nurse who kept his medical chart, Janice Kinsinger, in an interview with police.
'His appearance was agitated and uncooperative,' Kinsinger said.
When the IV was finally inserted, DeRosia was given a sedative. About 12:20 a.m., he was transported to the main medical center at the base.
The doctor in charge of that facility, Lester Kallus, suspected 'either drug intoxication or internal bleeding,' he told police a couple days after the concert.
DeRosia went into seizures again about 12:55 a.m. and was given medicine to control them. His heart rate was 170 to 180 beats per minute. Doctors gave him at least three electrical shocks to stabilize his heart rate, bumping up the energy each time.
At 1:57 a.m., DeRosia was airlifted by helicopter to University Hospital, in Syracuse. There, doctors finally took his temperature. It was nearly 107 degrees. Emergency room doctors began trying to cool him with ice packs and a cooling blanket.
By 1:31 p.m., DeRosia was in a coma and 'oozing blood from all orifices,' his chart reads. A doctor noted the primary diagnosis: 'hyperthermia, probably secondary to heat stroke.'
With organs shutting down, DeRosia lay in the coma for another day. Shortly after noon Monday, July 26, his pulse and blood pressure disappeared. DeRosia was declared dead at 12:09 p.m.
State police investigated the death, but they closed the case a few weeks later after the autopsy report ruled the death was accidental. No charges were brought.
The autopsy report lists the cause of death as hyperthermia, or overheating. It also lists two other diagnoses: an enlarged heart and obesity.
DeRosia stood 5-foot-9 and weighed 339 pounds. The doctor in the Onondaga County Medical Examiner's Office who did the autopsy, Jacqueline Marin, told police that DeRosia's weight had little to do with his death.
'She stated that ... the fact that he was obese probably had no bearing on his death,' wrote police Investigator Dennis Dougherty.
Woodstock 1999 Concert Video
Cote said DeRosia's death proves that the medical tents were ill-equipped to handle heat stroke patients at a concert where temperatures approached the 90s.
In her deposition, the nurse, Kinsinger, recalled: 'I did not take a single temperature the three days I was at Woodstock.'
Ten years later, the legal fight continues.
Cote said the case has taken so long because he has had a hard time getting information and scheduling depositions. Cote says the potential award in the case is in 'the mid-six figures,' because New York law limits damages in wrongful death suits.
DeRosia's mother is 'in failing health,' Cote said. She lives in the same house she once shared with her son. Cote said she remains shattered by the death of her son.
'I have lost a really, really special kid,' she said in her deposition. 'There's no way for me to describe how horrible it is not having him around.'
As a three-day-long festival, Woodstock allows for a plethora of bands spanning multiple musical genres the chance to play in front of hundreds of thousands weary, chemically altered souls. But until the event kicks off the weekend of July 23-25 in Rome, N.Y., the talent line-up should be written in pencil. For one, despite reports elsewhere, Marilyn Manson and Guns n’ Roses will not be performing. “Marilyn Manson needs to be in the dark,” according to a source close to the band. “It’s pointless to see Marilyn Manson in the daytime. Without a guarantee that they can play in the dark, there’s no point in playing the show.” G n’ R, according to the same source, simply won’t have an album ready for release in time for the festival. Counting Crows, also reported to be on the bill, are not scheduled to play.
Artists expected to participate in Woodstock ’99, in alphabetical order, include: Aerosmith, Bush, Chemical Brothers, Creed, Sheryl Crow, DMX, Everlast, Fatboy Slim, John Fogerty, Hole, Ice Cube, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Live, Los Lobos, Metallica, Alanis Morissette, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rusted Root, Sugar Ray and the Tragically Hip. Artists still on the fence include Brian Setzer Orchestra, Collective Soul, Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters, Jewel and the Offspring.
Last minute additions will undoubtedly alter the line-up, with electronica artists Underworld, for one, still mulling an offer to play the festival. A press conference scheduled for next Thursday (April 8) should bring much of the morphing line-up into final focus. Stay tuned for details.