By Jamie Towey

It’s a strange thing, scrolling through the phone of a dead person. Reading their messages, listening to voicemails that will never get a call back, flitting between apps and Safari windows like that person must have done tens of thousands of times before they passed.

Last July was the first time I’ve ever had to do that. I found myself in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon with Frank Barnes, our Director of Media, after months of investigating a story that I initially doubted. But that morning in Beaverton, it was as clear as that morning’s blue Oregon sky – Eileen Mihich’s death was real, and Washington’s Death with Dignity law was to blame.

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March of 2025 was busy at Aging with Dignity – February saw the long-overdue rebrand of our website, and we had just announced an ambitious research endeavor, Assisted Suicide Watch. On top of our usual work, our team was hustling to field media requests and troubleshoot website bugs, all while operating shorthanded as I searched for a new office manager.

On the morning of Monday, March 24^th, I was jolted from this frenzy with the notification of a “Contact Us” submission from a woman named Veronica. “I am reaching out to you with a broken heart,” it began. The message that followed read almost as a caricature of what opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have warned. A mentally ill young woman without a terminal disease skated past Washington’s guardrails and was found dead in a hotel room, an empty bottle of PAS pills by her side. I am sorry to say, my first reaction was concern that this was some kind of catfishing operation from Compassion & Choices or Death with Dignity.

Nevertheless, I asked if Veronica could share her story over a video call. She agreed, we picked a date, and in the runup I carefully read through Washington’s state law and health codes. Several days later, Veronica and I spoke, joined by her daughter, Sarah. It immediately was clear that these women were beset by a range of negative emotions and were genuinely upset; they sounded truthful.

As for their story, Veronica and Sarah claimed that Eileen Mihich (their niece and cousin, respectively), a bubbly and goofy, but mentally ill woman had somehow beaten Washington’s PAS system in a way that I, and others who study PAS for a living, had never thought possible. Eileen had directly contacted a pharmacy in Washington under the name of a real-life physician, used that physician’s publicly available information to fraudulently fill out a prescription for DDMAPh (the poisonous cocktail prescribed for PAS), and then picked it up herself directly from the pharmacy.

I was baffled. How did Eileen pull this off? Her life was in complete disarray, yet she figured this out all by herself. Did someone help her, or at least inform her of this niche workaround? Was the doctor she impersonated in on it? Was the pharmacist? Could this be the tip of an iceberg of abuse and fraud? So many questions coursed through my mind, but one thing was certain – if what Veronica and Sarah conveyed was true, the world needed to know.

(Parts II and III coming soon.)