Dr. Carl Elliott

She called, she sent emails, she went to the Department of Psychiatry.

She wrote to the chair of psychiatry again and again, expressing her worries.

Eventually left a voicemail message for the study coordinator saying, does he have to kill himself or somebody else before anybody is going to do anything?

And three weeks or so after she left that message, his body was found in the shower of a halfway house where he was staying.

And next to his body was a note that said, I went through this experience smiling.

Not for another four years.

I read about it in the St.

Paul Pioneer Press in, I believe, would have been May of 2008.

I was actually on sabbatical at the time.

I was in South Africa.

A friend of mine who was one of the reporters who did that, Paul Tosto, had sent me links to it.

I found it so alarming that when I got home a few months after that, I started asking around and trying to find out what had happened.

Because it's actually my area of work.

I mean, I work on research ethics.

I work on psychiatric ethics.

I had been on the Institutional Review Board at the university for several years.

I knew people in the Department of Psychiatry, and yet this grisly death, I had heard nothing about it.

And when I started to ask around, it just felt as if no one was as alarmed by it as I was.

Not people in the Department of Psychiatry, not people in the Bioethics Center, not administrators.

And eventually it became clear to me that it was going to take some kind of pressure from the outside to get the university to act.