Although Millard County resident Janet McIntyre had been placed on a no-alcohol restriction by her doctor after her medication was changed, she still drank, despite the risk of an adverse effect.
And less than a week before her death at her Scipio home in 2013, the 58-year-old woman’s estranged husband provided her with alcohol, according to court records.
Prosecutors say Lee J. McIntyre knew that alcohol in combination with prescription medications could be fatal to Janet McIntyre, but he still brought his wife a bottle of “cheap vodka” and then got rid of the bottle at a nearby gas station after she died.
The state medical examiner said Janet McIntyre died Oct. 18, 2013, from the combined effects of alcohol and prescription drug toxicity, obesity and asthma, court documents say.
Lee McIntyre, now 63, was eventually charged in 4th District Court with manslaughter, a second-degree felony — later reduced to negligent homicide, a class A misdemeanor — and tampering with evidence for allegedly disposing of the empty vodka bottle.
But on Wednesday, the case was resolved with McIntyre entering a so-called Alford plea — meaning he did not admit guilt but acknowledged that there is enough evidence to convict him — to tampering with evidence, a class A misdemeanor.
According to court documents, the plea is being held in abeyance, so if McIntyre does not commit any new offenses other than minor traffic violations for a year, the case will be dismissed.
In charging McIntyre, prosecutors said the state did not have to prove that providing alcohol to his wife was an illegal or wrongful act in and of itself. They said in a brief that the state merely had to prove McIntyre failed to perceive a “substantial and unjustifiable risk” that providing alcohol to his wife would result in her death and “that such a failure constituted a gross deviation from the required standard of care.”
At a hearing in November, though, prosecutors conceded there was not enough evidence to pursue the negligent homicide charge and 4th District Judge Anthony Howell dismissed that count.
The McIntyres had lived together for years in Scipio but were separated at the time of the wife’s death. Janet McIntyre, a regular drinker for most of her adult life, had been taking numerous medications for a variety of illnesses but was still asking relatives to bring her alcohol, court records say.
After a hearing in 2016, the husband was ordered to stand trial in the case.
Lee McIntyre’s lawyers, Gregory Smith and Aaron Owens, had sought to have the case thrown out, arguing that Janet McIntyre was an adult who knew the dangers of mixing alcohol with her medications but still drank. There was no evidence her husband even opened a bottle of alcohol, they said, and he did nothing illegal by providing a legal substance to a sober adult.
“The Defendant did not do anything to force her to drink and was not even there when she drank,” a defense brief says.
In addition, the lawyers had argued there had been no evidence tampering because investigators had allowed McIntyre in the house on the day his wife died, and he had no way of knowing the bottle might be evidence when he threw it away.
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