What's Wrong With Diane Schuler?! The Taconic Parkway Tragedy

[Music] hey guys welcome back to my channel so first of all I wanted to note that my hair looks really different my stylist went a little blonder then I'm typically used to but I don't know I'm getting used to it I don't know what do you guys think does it look good should I just chop it all off and start over let me know there's no bunny on the bed today but I do have a cat and I have a dog if you guys didn't know I have well right now I have like 15 animals in the house so it really varies of who's in the background there were a lot of comments about my rabbit last time so today I am doing a video that I wanted to do for a really long time this is one of the weirdest stories one of the most confusing and frustrating cases out there I think this is so weird I can't wait to hear what you guys think of this one what your opinions are gonna be and what you think really happened because I cannot come to a conclusion on this one I have been debating it back and forth with Josh over the past 24 hours it is just such a frustrating and confusing one today I'm gonna be telling you about a woman named Diane Schuler so Diane Schuler was born on November 13 1972 in Floral Park New York she had four brothers and when she was younger her mom actually left the family and this was very hard on her although she did not let this become a big part of her life she really didn't talk about it often she did not let it drag her down in any way and her siblings actually ended up kind of reuniting with their mother but she never really got that relationship back with her she just did not want to be involved with her even though that was so painful she really glazed over it in her life may not have dealt with that baggage actually maybe it was a painful thing for her that really could have been eating away at her she was a very tough lady and she was considered the woman of her house she was a very hands-on mother she really kind of set the rules she was the boss of the house according to her husband and the kids and pretty much everyone else that she knew she was a mother of two she was married to a man named Daniel Schuler she had a daughter named Aaron and he son named Brian and she loved being the mom she knew she wanted to be a mom from a young age and she was really into it like I said she was very hands-on she's involved in the PTA she was always signing up for things people that were around her you know just described her as someone who was on top of everything you know it was very well-planned very organized her kids were meticulous they were definitely known to be well taken care of she was very into being a mom and that's important for this story so the day of the incident July 26 2009 Diane and her husband Daniel decided to take their kids and their nieces on a camping trip to Hunter Lake campground in parksville New York and this is a really beautiful area a great place for families to go to get away from it all and kind of connect and with them they had their daughter Erin their son Brian and then Diane's nieces and this is Diane's brothers kids Cate Hantz who was five years old Alison who is 7 years old and Emma who is 8 years old and it was a very typical morning for camping they had just had a great couple of days outside bonding having fun together doing some mores doing all that and this was the day that they were going to be driving home and it was a pretty normal day Daniel woke up first and started making coffee started kind of getting things together and then quickly woke up his wife Diane around 7:00 7:30 ish they then woke up the kids and started cleaning the camper and they had planned to get on the road as soon as possible to beat the traffic so they decided that her husband was going to take their dog because he had a truck with an open truck bed he was gonna take the dog and just go straight home and then she was gonna go straight home as well but with all the kids and so she had a minivan specifically she had a red 2003 ford windstar minivan that she was actually borrowing from her brother for the weekend so Diane and the kids headed off at 9:30 a.m. around there to actually get some breakfast at McDonald's they were on their way back to West Babylon and they stopped at the McDonald's in Liberty on the way and they even said that she seemed completely normal she's having a fully attentive conversation with the restaurant worker and she drove to a gas station and there's again some video footage surveillance footage of her at the gas station and she's completely normal in the gas station she's there to buy some type of pain medication and they ended up not having it so she left without it but they think that she possibly could have been having a painful tooth so she left the gas station in Liberty just after 11 a.m. and then was driving along Interstate 80 six and interstate 80 seven and this is when they started getting reports from witnesses that there was a person driving a minivan and driving really aggressively flashing their lights tailgating switching back and forth lanes really fast and then at 11:37 Diane ended up calling her brother his name is Warren and he is the father of the three girls that were also in the car and she just told him that they were going to be a little late they were a bit delayed by traffic then around 11:45 a.m. Diane was seen by a witness on the side of the road and it looked like she might have been throwing up she seemed to kind of have her head bent over and was leaning down looks like she was sick and then a little while after that at a kind of rest stop area she was seen doing the exact same thing although no one bothered to go up and see if she was okay or what was going on because they probably would have seen that she had a bunch of kids in the car and maybe she shouldn't been driving so then at about 1:00 p.m. Warren got another call from Diane's phone but this time it was one of his daughters want me something's wrong with you tiny mommy something's wrong with aunt Diane and she was crying I didn't understand I said what do you mean and and I could hear Allison crying in the background I said let me talk to you aunt Diane and so Diane got on the phone and it was she just kept singing they're playing they're having fun she just didn't sound right Diane didn't know she wasn't making any sense so no one knows exactly what was going on in that car but whatever was going on really scared of the kids at the end of the phone call it just kind of suddenly ended like she just hung up or got disconnected maybe and then she left her cell phone on the side of the highway and no one knows why I 115 Warren tried to call back several times but got no answer I'm trying to help a friend of mine he took his girls camping they're very young girls the oldest is nine the curls the girls just called in distress they said that the answer is driving very erratically we think she's sick the answers and picking up the cell phone right now the sister called she can't talk anymore there's three kids in the car they're trying to five they're trying to locate her the woman's name is Diane Shula they just put it out to the post car and see if they can locate her because the the woman that's driving the car they think is having a medical emergency she cuz she called him that she couldn't talk anymore and she's got five kids in the car he's named in cars registered to your car and then at 1:30 p.m. two drivers called 911 to report Diane actually driving really close to the edge of the road going northbound this is when she came up to an exit ramp and there were two signs at the end of this exit ramp that said one way and another one that said do not enter so it should have been very clear to her that she was going the wrong way but for whatever reason Diane continued onto the highway going the opposite direction of traffic and within a minute there were four different calls placed to 911 reporting someone was driving the wrong way on the highway north Peconic anything in the right lane going southbound the cars going like 70 miles an hour the wrong direction State Police now on yeah you got a guy driving south on a North opticon o'clock what oh I was in the left lane just Pleasantville Road he's going like the bat out if you're on a same Parkway right now it was very surreal seeing it coming at you saw what you had there was you know thank God there was nobody on the side I was able to go over a couple of lanes as the van came by me and I said at the time 70 miles an hour because it was speeding right by dead pin straight that like industry wasn't doing this was dead pin straight both my heart was going about 200 you know beats a minute and you know just to react quickly get out of the way and then the car went past us we saw something coming at us we reacted we moved she had no reaction at all she didn't stop she slowed down she took Moo and Diane looked completely normal people that saw her said that she looked like she was just driving casually with just like a blank face she was just cruising down the wrong way down the highway going 75 to 85 miles an hour somewhere in that range I don't think she had any idea she was on the wrong side the highway so they continued on the highway for 1.7 miles before they finally got in an accident Diane ended up colliding head-on with a 2004 Chevrolet Trailblazer the Trailblazer then hit another car a 2002 Chevy Tracker and at the time that Diane hit them witnesses say she was driving erratically along this road weaving in and out of traffic and honking her horn tons of people got out of their car to try to help them but it was just a horrible scene I mean the cars were trashed you could just see the metal was so tangled up and there are pictures of Diane I'm obviously not gonna put them in this YouTube video I really don't even recommend looking them up I don't know why there's pictures of her release I don't think there's pictures of the kids but it's just brutal she was in terrible condition and the saddest thing about this is that the kids didn't seem to have even been wearing seatbelts they don't even know if they were in car seats they may have just been like free roaming the car Diane's daughter died immediately at the scene of the crash as well as Diane and so did two of her nieces her son was trapped under the bodies of other four children and wasn't even found at first but eventually they found him and he did end up surviving they took him to the hospital of her other niece however was barely hanging on to life they brought her to the hospital and she did end up passing then in the other car the Trailblazer three men also died 81 year old Michael Bastardi his 49 year old son guy and their 74 year old friend Dan Longo luckily the two people in the Chevy Tracker only had minor injuries but it was just terrible so like I said Brian her son did survive he had several broken bones I mean he was in bad condition he had head trauma he had to be in the hospital for several months but he did survive however he now has something called ocular motor nerve palsy which affects the movements of his right eye held on July 30th such a tragic event for all these kids to just die in a split second and it just made no sense why was Diane on the wrong side of the road what was going on what was happening in the car why were the kids crying none of this made sense and I think that's why this made it so much harder for people you know attending the funeral and stuff because it was just so tragic so obviously people start to think was Diane maybe under the influence of something that's obviously what you're gonna think because in most situations where someone's driving on the wrong side of the highway they're drunk so once investigators started looking at everything a little more and searched her car they actually found a bottle of vodka it was broken but it was on the driver's side on the floor daniel was asked about this yeah the State Police there was a bottle of Absolut Vodka in the band all right now I'd explain to vodka we usually will keep it in our camper throughout the whole season one bottle why why you know your pina colada is usually by a camp what was the vodka bottle doing in a car my wife packed all the bags that day in the camper and leaves them by the door I carry him from the camper to the trucks I'm very surprised that the vodka bottle was in there I had no idea watches he give you does it give you pause to think that maybe just maybe she was a drinker and you didn't know it I feel it for 13 years absolutely not Daniel - I appear here why keep on doing this the truth the truth will come out but Larry you have to understand Danny doesn't want the other families to think that a drunk driver killed their families that's why we are out to prove that you try prove that she wasn't drunk he was very steadfast that she was not drunk it was early in the morning like driving home from a camping trip who decides to just get trash randomly you know this isn't making sense but then the toxicology report came back they found that she had a blood alcohol content level of 0.9% the legal BAC limit for driving while intoxicated in New York is point zero eight percent there was approximately six grams which is about ten drinks worth of alcohol in her stomach that had not even been absorbed into her blood yet they were also able to see that she had high levels of THC in her system which doesn't necessarily mean she was high right then it could have been something she smoked earlier the night before or something but it definitely raised some flags so even after these reports came out though Daniel and a lot of people close to Diane work completely against the idea that she was intoxicated while she was driving they said there has to be another explanation for this why would she just randomly wake up and decide I'm gonna get trashed and drive all these kids in a minivan home like from the mountains it's just very odd I never knew her to drink so why would she be drinking with my kids in the and her kids in the heart like didn't know just know I just thought it's impossible and it was mistake you give a more detailed description what happened before she went off on the trip woke up at 6 o'clock went down to my folks to clean it out and do what I got to do back about 4 to 7 7 o'clock and woke her up saying we have to start cleaning the camper so you can start getting home before traffic you woke up started packing the bag slowly started waking the kids up slowly again the kids trip we unloaded the camper all the bags outside the camper and I walk him to the car and we loaded him up he had a cup of coffee two cups of coffee and then we left do you remember your last words yeah I kissed everyone go buy a my wife daniel was starting to get really upset because the media was really starting to portray Diane as maybe not such a good mom and he didn't want people's memory of her to be tainted and for people to think that she would selfishly get trashed like that and then drive her kids but did she daniel schuler and his attorney originally stated that there was no alcohol or drugs being consumed on the camping trip that was the original story but then it kind of changed and he started saying well you know my wife never really drank to excess and there was some drinking that weekend but that she had nothing to drink on the day of the actual crash one of the campground co-owners actually talked to Diane that morning as she was about to leave she was someone who knew Diane they were like kind of friends with them and she said that she was completely sober that morning that there was no reason to believe that she was under the influence so why would you all sudden start getting crunk when you get in the car it doesn't make any sense in addition to this the gas station employee and the McDonald's employee said that Diane was completely sober that nothing was out of the ordinary about her and she was completely fine now she was looking for painkillers at the gas station though she wasn't able to find the ones that she wanted but we have no idea why she would have wanted these and was it for possible tooth pain was it for a headache the tooth pain thing is interesting because one of her best friends said that Dan was constantly like rubbing this one area on her cheek especially the week that this happened and the Diane had also had several dentists appointments over the past couple of years and she really hated having dental work done like was afraid of it and she had to have this one extraction done and they actually got her dental records back and could see that she chose not to actually have the procedure done she literally went in there and then was like [ __ ] no and left so does that mean that maybe she had like a really badly infected or painful tooth going on that she was hiding to avoid having to go to the dentist because she had fear of that as far as the autopsy goes there was no damage to her organs so there was no way that she was like a serious alcoholic behind everyone's backs but the autopsy also showed that there was no abscess found in her tooth all of Diane's family talks about how she really wasn't a heavy drinker that she barely drank like she could hold her liquor it wasn't like she was an alcoholic by any means Daniel however did say that she didn't do drugs or drink heavily but she did smoke occasional weed that it helped her with insomnia and pain which it does and even though the data shows that there was THC and alcohol in her system it's really hard to believe that she just woke up and decided she was getting [ __ ] up before this drive with all these kids like PJ mom of the year decides to go smoke a joint and down a bunch of vodka before going on this car ride home from a camping trip through the mountains this is making no sense to me but like the data shows that she was intoxicated Daniel actually believes that Diane suffered from some bizarre medical issue that maybe she had a stroke or like an aneurysm or something like that however when they did the autopsy they did not find signs of anything wrong so after she was already buried and everything and the autopsy was done obviously they decided that they actually wanted to exhume her body and see if maybe they could test her hair to see if there was any sign of previous drug use because your hair holds drugs longer than anywhere else and so that's the best place to test someone for drug use so they decided they were gonna exhume her and HBO was actually gonna film it and they were gonna pay Daniel a hundred thousand dollars to allow them to fill them the and everything and this was gonna go into a trust fund for their son Brian and this never ended up happening for whatever reason so they never did that testing on her hair anything but people have been very critical of Daniel for him being so defensive of his wife refusing to accept that maybe she was drinking and driving that maybe she had a secret alcohol problem he was getting a lot of backlash from family from the public you know the people that were closely affected by this accident who lost loved ones wanted closure and they felt like Daniel was kind of not allowing them to do that so then in June of 2010 New York State Police released its final report on the accident they released the same information that Diane was highly intoxicated at the time of the crash and also had traces of THC in her system and what was interesting is the medical examiner actually determined this crash to be a homicide they decided that Diane's driving was reckless and that the victims were killed because of that she didn't have them in seatbelt she was driving out of control and swerving around then on August 18th the DA decided that there would be no charges pressed in this case because Diane is the only one who could be held responsible and she's no longer here the bast Rd family was really pissed about this they felt like there was a serious lack of justice going on for their family members who died which rightfully so fast rd family actually filed a lawsuit against Daniel and Warren who lost all three of his kids as well and they were seeking unspecified damages for reckless conduct Daniel ended up hiring his own independent investigator for $30,000 to look into it and he found the same thing Diane was highly intoxicated from alcohol and marijuana but despite this Diane's family was still refusing to accept these results because they didn't make any sense and they were so out of character in July of 2007 Warren's wife actually filed a lawsuit against Daniel she claimed that her three daughters suffered from terror fear of impending death extreme horror fright and mental anguish Daniel ended up filing a lawsuit against the state of New York for unsafe roads and he also sued Warren because the car that Diane was driving belonged to and they actually were required by the state to include Warren in the process because of insurance reasons but still it was very tense everyone was on edge but eventually all these lawsuits got dropped in August of 2009 New York Governor David Paterson proposed the child passenger Protection Act and this made it a felony to drive while intoxicated if a passenger under the age of 16 is in the vehicle Jackie and more enhance who lost their whole family in this accident created a foundation called the Hantz Family Foundation and the main purpose of it is to honor the lives of their three daughters by ensuring healthy happy and safe children through self esteem educational programming the foundation runs a program that is designed to educate girls and promote appreciation for their genuine qualities self-awareness and satisfaction of helping others I mean I can't imagine how their lives have been affected by this it would be absolutely brutal to lose all three of your kids like that her friends convinced her to rejoin their early morning runs and after a while they even suggested she think about having another child to help her heal she refused even consider the idea feeling she was too broken to be a mother again and besides technically it wasn't possible because she had had her tubes tied but her friends persisted and got her to a fertility specialist so you tried I tried and I have prayed on October 11 2011 Casey Rose arrived Jackie and Warren's new bundle of joy Casey is now 17 months old a little girl teaching her parents to let go of some other tragedy and to know that even after all that has been lost there is still a way to go on it just gives you a meaning again when you lose everything and then you get something to hold on to there's really not no way to be able to describe it she brings a heartbeat to this house again so what actually happened to Diane so some people who knew Diane said that she smoked a lot more weed than what was actually originally said some people claimed that she smoked a lot and that she smoked even during the day sometimes and that it was highly possible she smoked right before getting in the car to drive but this is so weird to me because even if that's the case even if she like smoked a joint or something before she got behind the wheel normally this causes people to slow down it's not gonna cause pain that would need her to go get Advil or something like that and it's gonna probably make the person drive a lot slower or more cautious definitely not aggressive and weaving through lanes I don't know that sounds really weird to me could it have been some type of bizarre tooth pain that was putting her into a state of delirium maybe she started drinking to help with the pain maybe she had that bottle of vodka and she started drinking some of it to help with the tooth pain but who does that while you're driving a bunch of kids none of this makes sense this doesn't make sense you guys this is driving me crazy then there's an idea that maybe Diane is suffering from a rare condition called auto-brewery syndrome it's also known as drunkness disease or gut fermentation syndrome but it's a real thing this happens when bodies turn sugary or starchy foods basically carbohydrates into alcohol it may be caused by like too much yeast in the gut is it possible that Diane had a bunch of carbs at McDonald's and then it made her feel literally drunk but wouldn't this have happened to her before and it doesn't explain why she was in pain and why she couldn't see and why she was looking for pain medication so literally nothing about this case makes sense I don't understand what happened that day I don't know what was wrong with Diane I don't understand how she had ten drinks in her system why would you drink that much is there more to the story though is there a possible fight between her and Daniel maybe she drank because of a bad experience that morning or the night before maybe she was hungover like extremely hungover I don't even know but why was there a broken bottle of vodka in the car why are her levels up so high none of this is making sense it really does seem like she was driving while intoxicated but this doesn't match up with her character this is one of the weirder cases I'm very curious to see what you guys think about this one so definitely leave a comment and let me know your thoughts but that's it for me today guys I hope you found this story interesting although it's very sad there's a lot of lives lost on this day and I just feel so sorry for everyone that this affected because this probably changed so many lives in just a few seconds it's unreal but that's it for me today guys stay safe out there and I will see you next time [Music] seems like it's been forever [Music]

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 1,291,251

Rating: 4.9495335 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, kendall rae vlogs, kendaily, daniel schuler, taconic state parkway, true crime, taconic parkway crash, thomas ruskin, news, diane schuler, diane schuler crash, mile higher, mystery, id discovery, mile higher podcast, dateline, crime documentary, crime, cold case, unsolved mysteries, buzzfeed unsolved, investigation, crime watch daily, creepypasta, paranormal, mysteries, unsolved, documentary, unexplained, buzzfeed, theories, unsolved mystery, strange

Id: -TXAKqsf35w

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 18 2019