--Daniel Schuler, right, holds hands with sisters-in-law Jay Schuler, center, and Joyce Schuler, left, while surrounded by reporters during a press conference in Garden City, N.Y., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009. Schuler's wife Diane was drunk and high on marijuana when she drove the wrong way for almost two miles on a highway before smashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others, a prosecutor said. Schuler family attorney Dominic Barbara says 36-year-old Diane Schuler wasn't an alcoholic but was diabetic and may have suffered a stroke before the July 26 crash north of New York City.--
--Daniel Schuler cries while his sister-in-law Jay Schuler speaks at a press conference in Garden City, N.Y., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009. Schuler's wife Diane was drunk and high on marijuana when she drove the wrong way for almost two miles on a highway before smashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others, a prosecutor said. Schuler family attorney Dominic Barbara says 36-year-old Diane Schuler wasn't an alcoholic but was diabetic and may have suffered a stroke before the July 26 crash north of New York City--
--Daniel Schuler's eyes fill with tears during a press conference in Garden City, N.Y., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009. Schuler's wife Diane was drunk and high on marijuana when she drove the wrong way for almost two miles on a highway before smashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others, a prosecutor said. Attorney Dominic Barbara says 36-year-old Diane Schuler wasn't an alcoholic but was diabetic and may have suffered a stroke before the July 26 crash north of New York City. --
She couldn't have been drunk and stoned. Her husband had never seen her intoxicated before. And there were absolutely no marital problems that could have sent her over the edge.
In an anguished, sometimes angry news conference, Daniel Schuler refused to accept an autopsy report that showed his wife had the equivalent of 10 drinks and smoked marijuana within an hour of the wrong-way highway crash that killed her and seven other people.
"I never saw her drunk since the day I met her," Daniel Schuler told reporters at a press conference outside his attorney's office. "She was not a drinker. She was not an alcoholic."
He suggested anything from a stroke to gestational diabetes to even an abscessed tooth could have caused his wife to act irrationally in the hours before her death.
A broken 1.75-liter bottle of Absolut vodka was found in her wrecked minivan, police said.
Family of the men in the SUV had questioned how Schuler's family could have been oblivious to an alcohol abuse problem and suggested criminal charges were possible. An attorney for the victims' family didn't return calls Thursday.
A preliminary autopsy of Diane Schuler ruled out a stroke, heart attack, or aneurysm, Westchester County officials said. The medical examiner said Thursday that he stood by his report that found her blood-alcohol level was more than twice the state's legal limit, she still had undigested alcohol in her stomach, and she had high levels of the key ingredient in marijuana in her system.
Diane Schuler was once diagnosed with gestational diabetes — which usually goes away after childbirth — had an undiagnosed lump on her leg and was suffering from an abscessed tooth for nearly two months. It was not clear how any of those maladies would prompt someone to become intoxicated.
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Fatal crash on the Taconic State Parkway - Leave 8 people die.Authorities are trying to determine how a woman driving a minivan carrying two of her children and three young nieces got onto a suburban parkway heading in the wrong direction, leading to a fiery crash that killed eight people and left a 5-year-old boy severely injured.
The afternoon crash in which the 36-year-old mother, her daughter and nieces died was the second wrong-way crash on the Taconic State Parkway on Sunday. Police also are investigating how a driver in an earlier accident also ended up on the road going against traffic.
The crashes on the parkway north of New York City happened 20 miles apart.
The minivan involved in the fatal crash was traveling south in the northbound lanes when it hit an SUV and then careened into a third vehicle, said state police Investigator Joseph Becerra. The minivan rolled down an embankment and burst into flames.
The minivan's front end appeared to have been almost entirely smashed in, and its shell was scorched and bent. Its driver and four of the five children inside it were killed, Becerra said. They were part of a family from Floral Park and West Babylon, on Long Island.
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