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Murder by GHB: Kyle’s Story

By Beth Pearce
Voice of the Victims
www.voiceofthevictims.com

What happened to Kyle Hagmann is so hard to tell!  But it is a story that has to be told.  I always like to try to tell these stories in the hope that it will help someone else.  But what do you say about a guy like Kyle who was doing everything right?  Well, I’ll tell it and let you all decide what the lessons are.

It’s Father’s Day as I write this, and I can’t help but think about Tony, Kyle’s dad, and wonder how he’s feeling today and what he’s thinking about. Would they be golfing at their favorite place?  If Kyle was still alive today, he would probably be married, and he would most certainly be a doctor in sports medicine helping so many people.  But none of this was to be.  

On the evening of April 23, 1999, Kyle returned to his dorm room after being out with the guys drinking beer. It’ reported Kyle had 12 to 14 beers. Tim Meacham, was staying in the same dorm room as Kyle.  Seven weeks earlier he was kicked out of his apartment and had no place to stay.  A girlfriend who was in the room with Meacham told investigators that Meacham left her briefly, and when he returned, he told her, “I gave him two capfuls.”  When the girlfriend asked what he meant, he told her he had given Kyle two capfuls of GHB in an attempt to make him sleep. Tim wanted to mess around with a girl, so he decided to knock Kyle out with GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate), an odorless, tasteless sedative with long lasting anesthetic effects on the user.

He thought he would just make Kyle sleep very soundly.  Even though he knew not to mix GHB and alcohol, and even though he knew Kyle had been drinking beer that night, Tim slipped GHB into Kyle’s drink. Kyle had no idea he’d been given the drug.  He went to sleep and never woke up.  It’s reported by very good sources that Tim went out and buried drugs in the middle of the night and didn’t call 911.  When the police were finally called, Kyle was dead and had been for a while.  

To me as a parent, this is another really creepy, evil story.  Kyle was attending a Christian college; he was a junior with a 4.0 grade average and was majoring in sports medicine. He didn’ t take drugs, and he didn’t hang around with people who took them either … well, let’s back up a second.  Kyle had just learned about GHB from the Internet.  He believed what he read there:  That it was a health supplement, something that would help him sleep better and wake up more refreshed after a late night of studying.  With this information, Kyle took GHB a few times on school nights only, and never with alcohol.  

Kyle was just the nicest guy you would ever want to meet!  You should hear his younger sister Sarah talk about him. You see pictures of him and Sarah when they were little; he’s feeding her baby food in her high chair and giving her rides on the tricycle.  When they got older, he used to always pull her sled all the way up the hill along with his, so they could ride down the mountain together.  He was very protective of her; he helped her and watched over his little sister.

This was such a botched up case.  The family was led to believe for a year to a year and a half that Kyle took the GHB himself, but further investigation proved that to not be the case. Through it all, the college seemed more interested in protecting its reputation than doing what should be done to protect its students.  

Whether it was the police department or the prosecutor, or both, Tim was never prosecuted for the murder of Kyle.  They let the case sit for two years and then, by the time they filed, it was 12 days past the statute of limitations for involuntary manslaughter.  So once again Elise, Tony and Sarah, Kyle’s mom, dad and sister, were devastated!  

How many times do we need to read or hear from family members in similar situations that since GHB is hard to prosecute, the system doesn’t even try?  It seems to me that we need more colleges, cops and prosecutors who really have the guts to look into these cases, not treat every drug death as “just another overdose,” and start putting behind bars the people who need to be put away.  As long as everyone wants to stay with the idea that these are hard to prosecute cases, as long as prosecutors don’t want to pursue charges because they might lose, there will be cases never brought to justice. I think there are perpetrators doing these things who know just that!  

What Tim did has affected and devastated so many lives.  I have heard that there are people involved in the case who still that want to tell what really happened that night, but are afraid.   What are they afraid of?  I just don’t know.  

Elise said to me several times that Tim needed help.  We all thought that he needed to face up to what he did, and deal with it, and maybe, just maybe, he could be the kind of guy who could talk to others and warn them to never do what he did.   

But this was not to be, either.  Earlier this year, on Easter Sunday, 2005, Tim was found dead of an overdose in his crummy apartment.  You have to wonder if this overdose was on purpose.  We have heard his life was never the same after what he did to Kyle.  It’s interesting that it was on Easter six years earlier that Elise and Tony saw their son for the last time.  


Beth Pearce