Jason Lappies woke up in his San Diego apartment on the morning of June 26. Not needing to report to work right away, he settled onto his couch to watch a World Cup soccer match. He teased his roommate, who had to rush off to a job.
When the friend returned later in the day, Lappies, 31, was still on the couch, positioned exactly as he had been in the morning.
He had died, mysteriously and unexpectedly.
An autopsy left as many questions as it answered. The medical examiner thought Lappies' death probably stemmed from cardiac arrhythmia — an irregular heartbeat — but couldn't determine the underlying cause.
Lappies, an all-star lacrosse player in college, had not been using drugs and didn't suffer from heart disease. He had been planning to leave soon for a repeat stint of teaching English in South Korea, a job he adored.
"No health issues, phenomenal athlete, traveled globally — just as healthy as can be," said his mother, Mary Lappies, of Oceanside, Calif.
Sudden deaths such as Jason Lappies' often go unexplained because standard autopsies cannot detect arrhythmias that cause the heart to stop in otherwise healthy young people. But a new clinical trial being announced Wednesday by the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif., may someday provide answers.
By performing "molecular autopsies" — taking tissue samples from sudden-death victims over coming months and sequencing their DNA — the county medical examiner and area researchers hope to ferret out the root cause when a young person dies inexplicably.
