Ryan Dunn of ‘Jackass’ was drunk when he died
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Ryan Dunn was drunk, with a blood-alcohol level of more than twice the legal limit, when his car sped through a guardrail early Monday, crashed into a tree and went up in flames, killing him and his passenger, according to a toxicology report out Wednesday.
The ‘Jackass’ daredevil’s blood-alcohol level was 0.196, said the report released by police in West Goshen Township, Pa. Like California, Pennsylvania has a 0.08 legal limit for drivers. The coroner, who was still waiting on results for prescription drug use, said tests showed no evidence of ‘drugs of abuse’ -- heroin, pot, cocaine.
Surveillance tapes from Barnaby’s, where Dunn, his 30-year-old passenger Zachary Hartwell and others had been drinking Sunday night, did not show him to be visibly intoxicated, according to the bar’s general manager, Frank Herron.
‘He spoke clearly. He walked clearly.... If these results are true, I’m shocked at it,’ said Herron, who also said the bar was cooperating in state and local investigations and had given the tapes to police.
While a light drinker would be slurring their words and showing other signs of impairment at that blood-alcohol level, a heavy drinker would be able to ‘walk around normally,’ said Dr. Kendel Kidwell, head of the emergency medicine department at Pennsylvania’s Abingdon Hospital.
Dunn, 34, had been charged in April 2005 with driving under the influence after crashing his car in the vicinity of Monday’s wreck, court documents said. He successfully completed a program designed for first-time nonviolent offenders, the papers said, and charges were dismissed.
The force of Monday’s crash left Dunn’s 2007 Porsche 911 GT3 in several twisted and blackened pieces, unrecognizable except for a door that was thrown from the crash. A 100-foot-long tire skid marked where the car left the roadway going in the neighborhood of 130 or 140 mph.
Friend and costar Bam Margera, who took on Roger Ebert with a vengeance online after the film critic commented about the crash Monday on Twitter, visited the crash site Tuesday. Margera said he was in Arizona at the time of the crash.
‘I’ve never lost anybody that I care about,’ a sobbing Margera, 31, told Philadelphia’s Fox 29 news. ‘And it’s my best friend.’
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— Christie D’Zurilla
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
