Drug-addled life, caring life collide

Both a 21-year-old and a Habitat for Humanity volunteer were acting typically when a crash claimed one's life.

By RYAN DAVIS and BRADY DENNIS

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 23, 2000

The troubled life of a 21-year-old Brandon woman collided Tuesday night with that of a well-known Dade City humanitarian.

Shanna Jane West, who turned 21 last month, said she was high on drugs as she drove along U.S. 41, swerved and slammed into another car, killing 53-year-old Barbara Mercer and injuring three others.

Mercer, a mother of two and an avid Habitat for Humanity volunteer, died at the scene.

West, who the Florida Highway Patrol reports was responsible for the accident, lived to face her regrets. No charges had been filed against her Wednesday night, but they were pending, troopers said.

"I guess I went into a head-on collision," West told a St. Petersburg Times reporter Wednesday. "I didn't see the other car. I didn't see anything.

"I just turned 21 and I already killed somebody. That's horrible."

It struck hard in the Mercer household.

"We're just all in shock," said Mercer's son, Tony, 16, with his 10-year-old brother nearby. "She was a very kind and compassionate person."

Their father, Lindy Mercer, got the news in Alaska, where he was working for British Petroleum Co. He caught the first flight back Wednesday morning, Tony Mercer said. The boys are staying with friends and relatives until their father arrives.

By all accounts, Barbara Mercer was doing something familiar when she was killed Tuesday: caring for others.

She was the front-seat passenger in the car with a family she had grown close to. The family would soon move into a Habitat house she helped build in Pasco County.

Virginia Martinez, 14, was scheduled to receive a college scholarship at the School Board meeting in Land O'Lakes. Her sister, Crystal Martinez, 8, and mother, Maria Florez, 33, each of Dade City, had come along.

"When I told Barbara about the scholarship, she said she wanted to go," Maria Florez said Wednesday evening, just back from the hospital, where she received stitches in her lip. Her two bruised daughters clung at her sides. "She was always there for me to help with whatever I needed. She was part of the family."

According to West and law enforcement officials, Tuesday's crash was no fluke.

It was the third time this month that West had wrought havoc while driving under the influence of GHB, which is commonly known as a date rape drug. GHB creates euphoria as well as sedation. The night before the accident, West said she fell asleep on Dale Mabry Highway and was arrested on a drunken driving charge. She posted bail and was released from the Hillsborough County jail less than 12 hours before the fatal accident.

West told her story to a Times reporter Wednesday afternoon as she smoked Parliament cigarettes, sitting with two broken arms in the home where she has been living on and off for three years.

Two problems have plagued West throughout her life -- drugs and traffic violations. Often they intertwined.

Records show she accumulated 12 points on her license during one year. She has been convicted in at least four counties of charges ranging from speeding to driving the wrong way on a one-way street.

She said she is manic-depressive and that no medication has worked. So at 14, she said, she turned to illegal drugs: marijuana, LSD, occasionally cocaine, and recently GHB.

Tuesday night, she said, she took two shots of Arizona Iced Tea laced with GHB before leaving her boyfriend's house near Carrollwood. They had been fighting, she said.

She didn't want to return home, she said, fearing that the man she lives with would want to have sex with her again. Going north on Florida Avenue, she headed to a friend's house north of Land O'Lakes, she said.

At U.S. 41 and State Road 54 in Pasco County, West said she started to pass in and out of consciousness. She was about 5 miles from her friend's house when she crashed, she said.

"I remember swerving all over 41," said West, a 1997 Land O'Lakes High School graduate, who learned the details of the crash by asking a reporter.

But witnesses at the scene said they remembered the tragedy all too clearly.

"She passed me on the right side, over in the grass," said Ron Nichols of Spring Hill. "I was blinking my lights, honking my horn, just trying to get her attention.

"I've never seen anyone drive like that in my life. It looked like she had a death wish."

West, an inventory clerk for a Tampa company, said she has always wanted to be a lawyer. She said she has been crying out for help.

"I've been begging for it," said West, the mother of a 4-year-old son, Christian, whom she rarely sees. "I just want to live straight and normal, and I don't want to be angry."

She wasn't the only one trying to suppress anger Wednesday.

Two families in Dade City tried to count their blessings, not concentrate blame.

Yet they grasped for answers to why their mother and close friend won't be home for Thanksgiving.

"It's hard, but I cannot be angry. I don't know why," said Maria Florez. "I was the last person to see her alive, and I'm going to go see her parents tomorrow.

"To me, tomorrow isn't going to be a holiday."

- Times Researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

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