Published: March 11, 2010
OU student Julia Gilbert’s autopsy report cites multiple blunt force trauma to her body and acute alcohol intoxication as the causes of her death.
Gilbert, French education senior and Kappa Alpha Theta sorority member, had ethyl alcohol concentrations of 0.14 percent in her liver and 0.24 percent in her brain, according to the State Medical Examiner’s report, released Wednesday.
Gilbert’s physical wounds occurred mostly from the accident, the report stated. She received wounds across her body as a result of the accident.
The report states authorities found Gilbert’s body nearly frozen in her car when it was found upside-down in a ravine in northeastern Oklahoma County two days after she went missing.
Gilbert had been at a BCS National Championship watch party at a friend’s house about five miles away from her parents’ home in Edmond. She was last seen leaving her friend’s house at 3 a.m. Jan. 8. Her vehicle was found Jan. 10, almost 18 miles away in the opposite direction from her parent’s house, on Waterloo Road near Council Road.
Why Gilbert was in the area when she crashed is still unknown.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever know why she was in that particular area,” Glynda Chu, Edmond Police spokeswoman, said in January.
Chu said there has been a lot of support from the Edmond community and those who knew Gilbert.
“[She] touched so many lives ... everybody joined in to find Julia,” Chu said.
According to Daily archives, the State Medical Examiner’s office ruled the death as accidental and the cause as an atlanto-occipital dislocation, more commonly known as a neck fracture, Cherokee Ballard, State Medical Examiner spokeswoman, said in January.
Ballard said the medical examiner concluded Gilbert’s death would have been quick, but there was no real way to tell definitively.
In memory of their daughter, John and Laurel Gilbert set up “The Julia Kathryn Gilbert Memorial Fund” to support Lyme disease research and to provide scholarships for French majors at OU.
Having struggled against Lyme disease for more than six months, Gilbert’s friends said she struggled with the lack of Lyme disease awareness in the community. A friend of Gilbert’s told The Daily in January that Gilbert went six months undiagnosed because medical professionals were unsure of what it was.
Click here to read The Daily's original story on Julia Gilbert's death
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