kristin rossum v. deborah patrick - Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

17400 ROSSUM v. PATRICK
On Thursday, November 2, 2000, de Villers confronted
Rossum about his suspicion that she was using drugs (she had
abused methamphetamines in college), and worse, that she
was having an affair with Robertson. He threatened that if she
did not resign, he would reveal both her drug use and her
affair.
Rossum testified that when de Villers awoke on the morning
of Monday, November 6, he seemed “out of it.” At 7:42
a.m., she left a message at his workplace stating that he was
ill and probably would not come to work that day. Rossum
went to work soon thereafter; coworkers saw her crying in
Robertson’s office. That afternoon, she went back and forth
from her work to her apartment. At midday, according to Rossum,
she ate lunch with her husband. When she asked him
why he had been so “out of it” that morning, he told her that
he had taken some of her oxycodone and clonazepam, which
she had obtained years earlier when she was trying to end her
methamphetamine addiction. According to Rossum, de Villers
went back to bed after lunch, and she returned to work.
Rossum left work at 2:30 p.m. and stayed with Robertson
until about 5:00 p.m., when she went back to her apartment,
leaving again at 6:30 p.m. to run errands. Upon her return at
about 8:00 p.m., de Villers appeared to be sleeping. After a
bath and shower, she found that de Villers was not breathing.
Rossum called 911 at 9:22 p.m. The operator instructed her
to move de Villers’s body to the floor and attempt CPR.
When paramedics arrived, they found his body on the floor
with red rose petals strewn around him. 1 Rossum initially told
the paramedics that he had not taken any drugs as far as she
knew, but later told them that he may have taken oxycodone.
1 The parties disputed the source of the rose at trial. See Rossum, 622
F.3d at 1266 n.2.