Forkston Mountain was socked in with a cold drizzle the late autumn day, nearly five years ago, that David Grasch arrived with his two cousins to do a little work on his hunting cabin, three miles up a narrow mountain lane in an out-of-the-way corner of northeastern Pennsylvania.
Grasch, Tony DiMartino and Pat Mahoney, all in their 20s, had driven up together from their homes in the Philadelphia region to meet someone who was going to install a permanent propane line. They unloaded some bags, fired up a gasoline generator and space heaters, and used Grasch's cell phone to check in back home.
They were never heard from again. Neighbors sent to check on their welfare found their lifeless bodies four days later.
The Pennsylvania State Police have never determined how the men died, and remain unsure if they are investigating a triple homicide or a tragic accident. But in recent weeks, state police have launched a renewed push to find answers, prompted in part by questions raised by The Associated Press about how the initial probe was handled.
Immediately after the men died, authorities strongly suspected a case of carbon monoxide poisoning, but after tests ruled that out they had to look elsewhere. That led them to Grasch's hometown in southern New Jersey, where it would later come out that he and his brother had been trafficking large amounts of cocaine.
Family members grew frustrated at the pace of the investigation, and the drug angle fueled suspicions among relatives about foul play. Two of them even hired a lawyer and took the state police to court in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to force them to reveal more about the case and to provide samples for independent testing.
"My life for the past four and a half years has been torture - torture," said Tony's mother, Maureen DiMartino of Philadelphia. "If it was carbon monoxide, I would have to deal with it. But not knowing what happened to my son is the most horrible thing ever."
Local
Breaking news and the stories that matter to your neighborhood.
Family members have never stopped pressing for answers, contacting news organizations, repeatedly calling investigators and even researching which poisonous plants were native to northeastern Pennsylvania.
They collected anything they could find about the case, including autopsy findings, court records, toxicology results and the blood-gas tests that helped investigators rule out carbon monoxide poisoning as a cause.
Citing an open investigation, state police have provided only limited information about the case, so the following account was largely drawn from the family members' research, dozens of interviews and court and medical records.
---
David Grasch purchased the 7.7-acre property in 2003 for $21,000, money his father said came from a trust fund established after he was injured at a playground as a child.
The Grasch family, avid anglers and hunters, had been spending time on 2,650-foot elevation Forkston Mountain for about a decade. The mountain lot and others nearby lack public water or power, and to this day many of them amount to little more than rustic hunting retreats.
Physical activity was often painful for 320-pound David Grasch, 27, who endured chronic pain from ankylosing spondylitis, a form of spinal arthritis. At the mechanic's shop where he worked he was largely confined to paperwork, and much of the cabin construction was handled by his brother Stephen and other relatives and friends.
His mother, Karen Grasch, said he liked to "just be away up in the mountains where they were free. My son just loved the animals."
By 2006 the cabin was fully enclosed but lacked an indoor toilet or running water. Today it is much the same, with an unfinished loft-like second floor, an attached garage and an open first floor decorated by seven mounted trophy deer. A gas-powered generator supplies electricity, water is drawn from a nearby spring and heat - supplied in 2006 by portable sources - now comes from permanent wall-mounted propane units. The week they died was not the first time Pat and Tony had been to the cabin to help out. Pat was unemployed at age 22 but had worked construction and for moving companies, while Tony, 21, was attending cooking school.
The three got to the mountain about 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, phone records indicate, after which they made calls to check in back home, telling people they were playing chess. The weather was raw, with temperatures struggling to hit 50 amid a light drizzle, and damp, as the region had received about a half-inch of rain the day before. They drove up together in a single vehicle, apparently stopping along the way to buy fast-food hamburgers. They brought their bags inside but died without unpacking them. Other gear was still in the truck.
Authorities have said the gasoline generator had been running in the garage, which David's father, Al Grasch, said was unusual. They usually dragged it outside and snaked the power line into the house through a window.
---
The phone calls stopped after Tuesday, another clue they may not have survived the first night. In the ensuing days, the concerns of friends and family grew to panic, and by Saturday, Stephen Grasch decided to check on them. At some point during the five-hour drive from Cape May, N.J., he reached friends who lived nearby and asked them to check on the cabin.
"When we got out of my vehicle, everything was bone-chill quiet," recalled neighbor Mark Kruzlik, 53, an auto parts deliveryman from Mehoopany. "Not a noise in the place."
He and the other man walked through an unlocked door to find David in a recliner, with Pat and Tony slumped down on a nearby couch. There were a couple cigarette butts in an ashtray, but few other signs of activity. Stephen Grasch arrived a few hours later and collapsed in tears after being told they were dead, Kruzlik recalled.
A number of signs pointed to carbon monoxide as the cause, from vomiting and aspiration of stomach contents to the relatively fast manner in which they died. The autopsies by forensic pathologist Dr. Gary W. Ross indicated no signs of trauma and did not determine an anatomic cause of death. All three had excessive fluid in their lungs and brains, and blood had massed in their buttocks, suggesting they died where they were found. Ross declined to comment for this story.
They all had drugs in their systems. David tested positive for oxymorphone - a byproduct of drugs such as Percocet - the synthetic narcotic fentanyl, and alcohol; Pat for prescription opiate painkillers oxycodone and Vicodin; and Tony for oxycodone and oxymorphone, as well as a trace of alcohol. A forensic toxicology report issued later concluded the levels were too low to have caused their deaths, even for David, as his results were consistent with taking the drugs as prescribed. Within hours of the autopsies, investigators obtained a search warrant for the cabin. They seized gallons of water, a plastic bag of vomit and, for reasons that remain unclear, felt stickers David Grasch was attaching to the pieces of his grandfather's heirloom chess set.
Police returned $1,500 in David's wallet to his father, cash that Al Grasch said was intended to pay for a better heating system in the cabin. Al and Stephen Grasch cleaned up the property, and burned the couch and easy chair that had been smeared with bodily fluids. Al Grasch said detectives who showed up with the warrant were not happy to find the smoldering ruins of what could be evidence.
Stephen Grasch said Wyoming County Coroner Thomas G. Kukuchka told him to burn the items, which Kukuchka denies.
The ashes and metal coils have never been removed, and remain in a pile about 50 feet from the front door. For some relatives, that fire has endured as possible evidence of a potential cover-up.
---
Soon after the deaths, several family members consulted a Philadelphia law firm, even dropping off the space heaters at their downtown offices. Nothing ever came of it, and before long the heaters were returned.
But things took a dramatic turn in August 2007, when Stephen Grasch was arrested in southern New Jersey and charged with running a drug ring that dealt large amounts of cocaine. Dozens of others, including his father, also were charged over several weeks. Al Grasch served a little over a year in prison and Stephen Grasch, now 34, remains behind bars, serving a 12-year term in a New Jersey state prison. Police said David was also involved in the drug-dealing ring, which his father confirmed.
Stephen Grasch said he was interrogated by detectives twice regarding the deaths of his brother and cousins, and to this day adamantly denies he had anything to do with them. Stephen Grasch was not charged in the case with any crime. He always appeared sincerely distraught and as someone who wanted answers, recalled his defense lawyer, Hal Kokes of Ocean City, N.J. In April 2008, Stephen Grasch paid to take a private polygraph while in jail in an effort to clear his name. The examiner concluded he had nothing to do with the deaths and was not withholding information.
Stephen Grasch says he has been willing to take a state-police administered test as well, but investigators never followed up on the offer.
"The polygraph was sort of to allay any fears" on the part of police, Kokes said. "'Hey, should we be investigating a homicide?'"
In a letter to Maureen DiMartino and Mahoney family members, Stephen Grasch said it was painful that anyone might think that he had something to do with it.
"Me and David were like a husband and wife," he wrote. "We lived together and took care of each other. I loved David more than I love myself."
The major drug case, and the failure of investigators to determine what happened inside the cabin, made some of Pat and Tony's friends and relatives wonder whether the Grasches knew more than they were saying about what happened, despite their categorical denials.
"Maybe Stephen owed somebody something, someone was out for Stephen, and the boys were at the wrong place at the wrong time," said Amanda Fanelli, who had been Pat's longtime girlfriend at the time of his death. "Stemming back to all the drugs in Cape May - that just made me suspicious."
Stephen Grasch blames police for stoking suspicions.
"The state police continuously told my Aunt Maureen, the Mahoney and the DiMartino families that the answer is in New Jersey and that I know what happened," he told the AP in a letter. "This accusation tore the entire family apart."
---
State police Sgt. Anthony Manetta said the case has remained under active investigation over the ensuing years, generating what he describes as a huge report. Family members also did their best to keep the matter alive, as shown by Maureen DiMartino's handwritten records that document dozens of calls to the lead investigator, the county district attorney and others.
Authorities tried to seize the cabin, claiming it had been purchased with drug money, but a Wyoming County judge ruled against them, and it ended up in the hands of Al Grasch. Only over the past year has he begun to spend time there, overcoming worries that perhaps some sort of toxic gas might have seeped out of the mountain and killed the three cousins.
Al and Stephen Grasch have always suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, which appears consistent with the known circumstances of death. They consider other potential causes, including foul play, unlikely.
"How would they kill them? Wouldn't something show up?" said Al Grasch. "They didn't shoot 'em, they didn't stab 'em, they didn't tie 'em up."
His ex-wife, Karen, also wonders about the quality of the authorities' investigation.
"I'm just leery that maybe tests weren't done the right way or that they weren't done extensively or something," she said. "What else could be the answer?"
Manetta said the department's cold case team has been taking a fresh look, but solid leads have proven elusive.
"We haven't ruled anything out, or anyone out, for that matter," he said. "This is just very difficult. It's a tough puzzle to solve."
Noted forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who reviewed the records at the request of the AP, said toxic fumes are his top candidate to be the long-sought culprit.
"I would bet anything in the world on that," he said. "That's the only, only explanation. It wasn't a visit from Martians, and it wasn't some terrorist from the Mideast."
Manetta said police investigators are considering a reenactment that would use the same models of space heater and generator to see what happened to carbon monoxide and oxygen levels, a prospect welcomed by family members.
"We are heading down both paths, whether it was an accidental death or criminal act," he said.
Al Grasch still has the heaters and generators and is willing to make them available to police for testing.
---
The answer may be found deep in the stack of records the families provided to AP, in the form of pulmonary laboratory blood gas test results from Scranton's Moses Taylor Hospital two days after the bodies were found.
Those tests helped rule out carbon monoxide, but experts say they also documented results that may be medically impossible. Two weeks ago, after the AP raised questions about the accuracy of those tests, the state police launched an investigation to see whether they were botched.
The main issue concerns carbon dioxide - not monoxide - a gas that Manetta said is normally ignored in death investigations because its levels increase after people die. But Wecht said there appears to be a gap in the medical literature about how quickly those levels increase, and how high they can get. The healthy range for carbon dioxide in blood, in the scale used to measure it, is 35 to 45, with dangerous levels existing well below 100. Pat Mahoney's level was 342, David Grasch's was 478 and Tony DiMartino's reached 764, the report showed. Consumer safety organizations have long warned carbon dioxide is among the gasses that can be emitted from combustion space heaters, but fatalities from the gas are extremely rare. It's unlikely a drafty cabin would trap enough gas to create fatal conditions, said Dr. Colin Grissom, a physician in Murray, Utah, who has studied carbon dioxide deaths in mountain avalanches.
"You have to have a totally enclosed space, like a mining accident," he said.
---
There are also questions about how the lab could have listed "zero" as David's blood oxygen level but 16 percent for oxyhemoglobin, said Dr. Neil Hampson, a Seattle physician who has treated more than 1,200 patients with carbon monoxide poisoning. Oxygen is a component of oxyhemoglobin, so zero for oxygen would have to mean zero for oxyhemoglobin, he said.
Hampson, past president of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, also said the hemoglobin results in general were so high as to make him doubt their accuracy, and he noted Pat's tests did not list any values in two categories, even though the test should generate results in all categories.
Their carbon monoxide levels were lower than he would expect for cigarette smokers, Hampson said. Hampson said there may have been problems with the hospital lab's equipment, perhaps improper calibration of the spectrophotometer. If the lab technician put the handwritten results in the wrong place, he said, that might account for the apparent errors and could show fatal levels of carbon monoxide.
"It seems most likely to me it's carbon monoxide poisoning," Hampson said. "I think there's something wrong."
Dr. Richard Vann, a professor of anesthesiology at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., who has studied carbon dioxide toxicity in the lab, agrees with Hampson's suspicion that carbon monoxide is a much more likely cause of death. Carbon dioxide poisoning, unlike carbon monoxide poisoning, is very uncomfortable, enough to awaken sleeping men, he said.
"In my estimation, it's much more likely to be carbon monoxide and very unlikely to be carbon dioxide poisoning," Vann said.
A Moses Taylor Hospital spokeswoman would only say it maintains a policy of not commenting on any coroner's case. Family members are anxious to see whether the flurry of new activity yields any new results. Manetta said a few days ago that a state police investigator plans to look into the hospital lab and meet with the coroner and forensic pathologist next week to go over questions about the blood gas results and other aspects of the case.
The five-year anniversary is two weeks away.
"I would like to know the truth," Al Grasch said. "For the whole family, you know, because it was so torn apart by this. To definitely come up with a conclusion would be great for the family."
