Before Karen's Coma

Since she lapsed into a coma more than eight months ago, Karen Anne Quinlan, 21, has become the center of an anguished controversy over her right to life--or death (TIME, Nov. 24 et ante). Described by her consulting doctors as being in "a vegetative state," Quinlan is breathing with the aid of a respirator, and her brain continues to send out the faintest of signals. A Morris County, N.J., court denied her adoptive parents' petition for the right to cut off the respirator that keeps Karen alive. Last week the Quinlans filed their first written arguments in what will probably be a long appeals process. Even as they were doing so, the case took a bizarre twist. New Jersey officials summoned William Dixon Zywot, 22, a companion of Karen's in the months before she became comatose, to appear before a grand jury. They wanted to question him about an egg-sized bump on the head, as well as a series of bruises on her body, that Karen received shortly before she was hospitalized last April 15.

The doctors involved in the case were aware of the injuries from the first, but concluded then that they had nothing to do with her collapse. Then what did New Jersey Attorney General William F. Hyland hope to learn from Zywot? Hyland said he was not accusing Zywot of a crime but was merely clearing up some loose ends about Karen's final days of consciousness.

"I'm not interested in her life-style," he insisted. Said a Sussex County official familiar with the case: "I think Hyland's purpose is to cover himself just to make sure there was no foul play." Whatever the motive, it appears that Quinlan's life-style underwent some marked changes during the months before she took the combination of drugs and alcohol that is believed to be responsible for the coma. She apparently fell into a depression in midspring, when a close relationship came to an end. Karen and another woman had once been inseparable, according to companions; but when the friendship ended, Karen was seriously upset.

Careless Mixture. Her life soon took another sudden turn. She had hoped to save up enough money to share the rent on a summer house with friends. But she was laid off her job as a production worker in a ceramics company and had no way to raise the money. Indications are that she became involved with a low-level New Jersey underworld figure who supplied her with drugs. That became one more reason to set her brooding--and may have made the careless mixture of drugs and alcohol more likely. It now seems clear that Quinlan's life was changing faster than she could quite comprehend in the weeks just before it slipped from her control altogether.

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