Jessica Fingers body isn’t even buried yet but the people closest to her have already started the blame game…
Via NYDaily News reports:
The sketchy boyfriend of Jessica Fingers, the Columbia University student who died in a dorm of a possible drug overdose, outed her Monday as a methadone user.
“If any of u idiots knew her then u know she was doing drugs long before she met me,” Peter Russell wrote on Facebook after some of Fingers’ friends and relatives blamed him for her death. “She bought that methadone her damn self.”
Russell called the doomed 21-year-old “the love of my life,” but erupted in the virtual world after Fingers’ family trashed him in the real one.
“I never liked him,” grieving mom Athena Fingers told the Daily News before formally identifying her daughter’s body. “He influenced the decisions she made in the last few months. He wasn’t good for her.”
But Russell’s former roomie, Thomas Meyer, said the boyfriend didn’t introduce Fingers to drugs.
“The friends that Jessica had prior to Peter were a party crowd,” he said. “I understand that her family is grieving and they need someone to blame. But they can’t solely put her death on Peter. The two made a conscious decision to do these things.”
Russell, a freelance tattoo artist, has been questioned by cops but not charged with a crime.Asked about Russell’s methadone claims, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly punted. “Ultimately, we have to wait for the medical examiner to make a determination,” he said.
Fingers, a high school track star in upstate Monticello, got a full scholarship to attend Columbia, but took a leave after suffering a stroke on Jan. 28, 2012, her mother said.
“She recovered completely,” said Athena Fingers, 45, who blamed the birth control device NuvaRing. Fingers was a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Merck, the maker of the device, records show.
Relatives said Fingers began dating Russell about 10 months ago while on break from the prestigious Ivy League school, where she was majoring in sociology.
Athena Fingers said Jessica was deaf to her warnings about Russell. “I tried to tell her what I thought, but she was grown,” the sobbing mom said. “She said she was in love. ”
A cousin, Asia Folsom, also blamed Russell, who could not be reached for comment. “Instead of helping her on the path of getting back into Columbia, which should have been the focus, he was taking her off that focus.”
“He’s the whole reason this happened to her,” said Cassandra (Boobiie)Robles, 21, who said she was Fingers’ best friend. “He fed her with drugs.”
Meyer, the ex-roomie, said Fingers got drugs on her own. He said she abused everything from methadone and H-ron to kush and cough syrup and that she and Russell were regulars on the druggy “rave scene.”
On the night she died, Fingers was visiting a friend at the East Campus Residence Hall on Morningside Drive, sources said. “That night was a crazy night of parties in the building,” said Aman Eyasu, a 23-year-old senior.
On his Facebook page, Russell said he was with the doomed student when she died. “I woke up and the love of my life was dead next to me,” he wrote. “My life is over . . .”
In Monticello, where the family home was decorated with Jessica’s track medals and trophies, Athena Fingers was inconsolable.
“She was my sunshine,” she said. “She was the perfect child, and now she is gone.”
Our hearts go out to her family and friends but is her boyfriend really to blame?
What do you think?
