An 18-year-old couple found in a car parked and running in St. Charles last month died of carbon monoxide inhalation, Kane County Coroner Rob Russell announced Tuesday.
Toxicology results received this week showed elevated carboxyhemoglobin levels in both Kody Dietrich and Adalina Donoso, but found no other substances, according to a news release from the coroner’s office.
Police said Donoso, of Racine, Wisconsin, was in a relationship with Dietrich, a St. Charles East High School junior who lived on the 1600 block of Indiana Street.
Through some kind of flaw, Russell said, carbon monoxide gas was able to enter the car while it was parked on a St. Charles street, eventually killing both occupants.
When St. Charles police investigators searched the 2001 Toyota Camry for clues, they found the manifold wasn’t connected to the exhaust tailpipe, which meant the exhaust was emptying into the engine compartment instead of out the tailpipe, according to a news release from St. Charles Police Deputy Chief Dave Kintz. The disconnect was the result of recent do-it-yourself work on the car, police said.
The temperature in St. Charles that day peaked at 42 degrees and dipped to 16, according to weather reports. When the teens were found in the car on the 0-99 block of 17th Street near Main Street, it had been left running, Russell said.
St. Charles police and fire departments responded to a call of a suspicious vehicle parked on the street at 8:08 a.m. March 16 — a Thursday — to find the pair unresponsive in the back seat. Officers and medics began life-saving measures and took them to the hospital, police said in an earlier news release.
Coroner staff responded at 9:30 a.m. that day to Delnor Hospital in Geneva, where both teens had been pronounced dead by emergency room staff, according to a previous news release from the coroner’s office. When the initial autopsy, performed the next day at the Kane County morgue, showed no signs of trauma or obvious foul play, the coroner announced the cause and manner of death were pending the results of toxicological samples collected and sent to a forensic lab.
Donoso initially showed signs of life, which indicates Dietrich had not been dead for long when medics arrived, Russell said. As best as police can tell, passersby last saw them alive in the car two hours before police were called, Kintz said.
When investigators tested the car with help from the St. Charles Fire Department, carbon monoxide levels had reached 1180 ppm, an extremely dangerous level, police said. Any concentration higher than 30 ppm is considered hazardous, according to police.
The flaw doesn’t appear to have caused a problem while driving, most likely because air flow kept exhaust out of the car, Kintz said.
Officials don’t think any foul play was involved, and the deaths have been ruled accidental, Russell said. Investigators’ findings are consistent with the coroner’s report, police said.
Between the work and time spent sitting in the idling car, Kintz called the factors “a perfect storm.”
“There is no indication this is anything other than a very tragic accident,” police said in the news release.
Investigators believe Dietrich and Donoso were in a relationship but did not know for how long, Kintz initially told The Courier-News.
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