Blonde Ambition by Rita Cosby Read Free Book Online

Texas.)
       When Howard returned with the food, they sat around Anna's bed and ate, a late-night celebratory party. There were two hospital beds and a large armchair in her room, and Anna was in the bed closest to the window. The other bed Howard offered to Daniel, but Daniel said he wasn't really that tired and said Howard could take it. The seemingly healthy twenty-yearold was going to stay up and watch some television. Daniel settled into the armchair; Howard took the other bed.
       Since Anna had a C-section just two days before, she was still quite weak and needed help getting to the bathroom, and, according to Howard, Daniel helped her to the bathroom "many times throughout the night."
       "At one point Daniel said to me, 'how come I'm so tired?'" Howard recounted on Larry King Live . "And, in hindsight, I wish that I had seen that as some sort of a signal and seen that something wasn't right."
       Several investigators have indicated to me that the statement was peculiar. Why would Howard have seen a young man being tired in the middle of the night after a day's travel from the opposite side of the continent as "a signal?" Why would that have indicated "something wasn't right?"
       "Unless," as one investigator put it, "Howard knew that Daniel had taken something. Or, more to the point, been given something."
       According to Doctor's Hospital records, a nurse making her rounds noted that at 6:20 a.m. Daniel was attending to his mother's comfort. Subsequently, during the hourly rounds, he was observed to be asleep on multiple nurse visits.
       Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Anna tried to wake Daniel who had moved into the bed with her. Though he appeared sound asleep, he was lifeless. "Howard!" she yelled. "Howard! Daniel's not breathing." Howard jumped out of bed and went to her bedside.
       "I checked Daniel's neck, and I didn't feel anything," he said. "We called the nurses and said it was an emergency."
       At 9:38 a.m., according to hospital records, the nurse was called to room 201, following which physicians on the floor were immediately summoned and straight away initiated CPR. A code blue was called and a team rushed from the emergency room. For twenty-two minutes, resuscitative efforts using Advanced Life Support Protocol continued on the lifeless body of Daniel, without response.
       Though they tried to get Anna to leave the room, she refused. She was hysterical. At some point early in the desperate chaos, Howard called Ben Thompson at the Horizons house and told him, "You need to get to the hospital as quick as you can. It's not good." He also found time to call Ray Martino in California, waking him up, and pleading with him to come to the Bahamas right away.
       Anna moved to the foot of the bed where she grabbed Daniel's leg and kept hugging it. Anna and Daniel often spoke about the Catholic Church, and the Playboy Playmate was known to pray to Mary every day. As doctors tried their last futile efforts, Anna was screaming and praying to Jesus and she was telling Jesus to take her and not take Daniel. It was an awful scene.
       At 10:05 a.m. Daniel Wayne Smith was pronounced dead.
       After the hospital gave up resuscitation efforts, Anna refused to. She screamed "No, no!" and continued trying to revive her dead son.
       "There was an airbag that they were putting air in," Howard later told Larry King. "And she had me doing that and she was pumping on his chest. And I just, you know, I don't know. I'm not a doctor."
       Anna just didn't want to believe that he had died. She wanted to keep going. She insisted they keep trying to bring Daniel back to life. She was screaming so loudly, her desperate cries could be heard down the halls of the hospital.
       When Ben Thompson arrived at the hospital around 10:30 a.m., about an hour after the emergency call came from the room, security was already clamped down. Ben came through the back entrance and when he got off the