A 22-year-old Scottsdale, AZ woman's trip to a Las Vegas music festival turned deadly after she fell from her hotel.
Emily McCaughan was in Las Vegas with friends for the Electric Daisy Carnival, a wild three-day music festival, but things got out of hand last Monday. McCaughan reportedly took the party drug ecstasy and had paranoid delusions which led to her falling from the 27th floor of the Circus Circus hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Her body was found on a third floor roof by hotel security.
ABC 15 reported that a family spokesperson said that McCaughan panicked after taking the party drug, MDMA, which causes hallucinations and paranoia. Friends said that McCaughan thought someone was stalking her.
Mignonne Walstad, a family friend, told the Las Vegas Review Journal, "Her girlfriends from the group tried to console her and calm her down and reassure her that no one is here looking at us," she said.
McCaughan insisted on leaving the festival, located at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Her friends, who also took the drug at the festival , brought her to EDC security and she was put in a cab, returning to her hotel room alone.
She then sent Facebook messages to her friends and asked for help, convinced that someone was still following her. She reportedly took the SIM card out of her phone and tried to barricade the hotel room door.
Her friends returned back to the hotel about an hour after receiving McCaughan's messages and found that she was missing.
Investigators believe that the small woman squeezed through the bars of her hotel room window and fell to her death.
McCaughan was not a regular drug user. She was a pre-med student at the University of Arizona who reportedly . Family members do not suspect suicide as a cause. The untimely death was a drug-related accident.
"Emily wasn't a person to commit suicide. She was a happy person and had a ton of friends, " her Uncle Mike Kelly told the Las Vegas Review Journal.
A memorial service was held on Saturday for Emily McCaughan.
This isn't the first drug-involved death related to the Electric Daisy Carnival. In 2010, a 15-year-old girl died after overdosing on Ecstasy at the festival in the former Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum location. The festival was then moved to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011.
