commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Silicon Valley has long been world famous as the pulsating heart of the hi-tech industry. It is the home of venture capital and its top executives make staggering amounts of money. One of these execs, Forrest Timothy Hayes, a married, highly-respected Google employee and father of five, has drawn his last fat paycheck a bit earlier than he anticipated.
It seems that Forrest was living a double life cavorting with a high-priced call girl named Alix Catherine Tichelman, formerly a journalism major at Georgia State university, on his private 50-foot-yacht, Escape, which he kept docked in the Santa Cruz Harbor. In addition to presumably engaging in the pleasures of the flesh with Alix, Mr. Hayes apparently enjoyed having her inject him with heroin.
This backfired on Nov. 23rd of last year when Alix, apparently inadvertently, allegedly injected him with an overdose on board his yacht, according to city police Deputy Chief Steve Clark. The case was apparently hushed up at the time, or at least it didn’t make the news. The police, however, began a criminal investigation.
Evan Sernoffsky of SFGate writes:
Santa Cruz police said Tichelman had an “ongoing prostitution relationship” with the victim, met him the night he died and injected him with heroin. Footage from a security camera on the yacht showed Hayes “suffering medical complications and going unconscious,” officials said.
Rather than call for help from authorities, Tichelman allegedly gathered her belongings, including drugs and paraphernalia, and at one point stepped over Hayes’ body to “finish a glass of wine,” before lowering the blinds to conceal the body and leaving.
The case hit the news Wednesday and made national headlines when Santa Cruz County prosecutors charged Alix with manslaughter.
The noted Loyola Law School professor and former AUSA Laurie Levenson, has suggested that prosecutors typically downgrade charges to manslaughter when they “don’t think they can prove malice, which means she realized the risk that he would die and disregarded it.”
This is apparently because pleasure seekers injecting heroin are rarely trying to kill themselves even though the risk is always there.
Levenson said authorities could pursue an involuntary manslaughter charge, or what some experts refer to as a “clueless killing” involving recklessness, as opposed to the more serious charge of voluntary manslaughter which generally refers to a death in the heat of passion or during a sudden quarrel.
Law enforcement cleverly lured Alix, 26, into their web on Friday by coaxing her to the Santa Cruz when an officer posed as a customer and offered her $1,000 for sex
On Wednesday, she appeared in court to face the manslaughter charge, along with counts of transporting drugs and destroying evidence. She remained in jail in lieu of $1.5 million bail, and was scheduled to return to court next Wednesday for arraignment.
Forest Hayes, who hailed from Dearborn, Mich. had been married for 17 years and had worked at several world famous tech companies including Sun Microsystems, Apple and finally Google.
“I was really devastated when I heard about it,” Todd Zion, who worked at Google for a short time under Hayes, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. “He was a great boss. I never had a chance to thank him.”
An unidentified person wrote on the online memorial page, “There are simply no words to describe this. I had the unique opportunity to work for Forrest at Apple and Google. He is one of the best bosses I have had – caring and thoughtful.”
Sad that Hayes, whose good side was apparently exemplary, is now dead because he couldn’t control his appetites. This hammers home the danger of dabbling in hard drugs, even if one is not an addict.
Alix kept a modeling page on Facebook which reportedly contained dozens of pictures of her posing seductively in racy outfits. In one post she wrote a poem titled “Heroin” with the opening line, “This private downward spiral – this suffocating black hole.”
Kara Heminger, a 28-year-old Atlanta resident, stated on Wednesday that she and Tichelman were friends and had modeled together.
“I knew she had problems. It was like she was running from something,” Heminger said. “I just thought she was back on drugs or something. A lot of her friends are very, very shocked about the accusations.”
Santa Cruz Assistant District Attorney Rafael Vazquez said police are still investigating the case and that the charges may change.
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This is truly a cautionary tale. It would appear that Forrest Hayes was set with a great job, plenty of money, a big family and so on, and yet he threw it all away for “kicks.” Of course, we don’t know what his non-work personal relationships were like or whether he resorted to Alix because of personal problems at home or simply because he was an inveterate pleasure seeker.
Observing the pictures of Alix, however, makes it very clear that she was into something vaguely resembling “heroin chic” and suggests that Forrest Hayes was helplessly trapped in her web. Or to state it a bit more crudely: Forrest wanted a “bad girl” and that’s exactly what he got. Be careful what you wish for, my friends. Of course none of us would fall prey to such a femme fatale, would we?
It also attests to the growing problem that heroin is becoming nationally as the “old reliable killer” continues to dig its claws into white America, not unlike what occurred in the overdose-laden 1970s, when the well-heeled California suburbs were riddled with heroin casualties.