INDIANAPOLIS — Traci Johnson believed it was God's plan for her to leave home to attend a tiny Bible college here -- and she prayed every day for the Lord to provide for her tuition.
Then an unusual opportunity presented itself.
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A Godsend, Till a Life Unravels
Traci Johnson joined a clinical trial of an antidepressant to pay for college. The devout woman ended up taking her own life.
THE NATION | COLUMN ONE
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday April 03, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Drug trial suicide -- An article in Friday's Section A about a young woman's suicide during a test of an antidepressant incorrectly gave the name of Indiana University as the University of Indiana.
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Eli Lilly & Co., the pharmaceutical giant headquartered a few miles from Indiana Bible College, was seeking healthy subjects for a live-in clinical drug trial. The 19-year-old freshman told her friends back home in Pennsylvania that the study was her best hope to stay in school.
"Trace, that don't sound right," her friend Colleen Jacoby told her. "I never heard of a human guinea pig."
But the students at the Bible college knew all about the trials. They made perfect subjects for studies requiring healthy people -- and they were used often, receiving hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a few weeks work.
If accepted into the study, she could make $150 a day for 49 days -- more than a year's worth of her school expenses -- for taking a drug known as duloxetine, an antidepressant that had already been given to thousands of people and was on the verge of approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
She had faith that God would find a way. "It was in his hands," she wrote in her diary.
Just before the new semester, a Lilly representative called. Her prayers were answered.
A month later, she was dead.
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Indiana Bible College is on the outskirts of Indianapolis, in a former hospital. With 260 students, it is a tight-knit community of Pentecostals. TV is banned and girls are required to wear long skirts. It's not unusual to see students drop their knapsacks and form an impromptu circle, praying for a sick aunt or alcoholic cousin.
For Johnson it was a sanctuary.
She grew up in blue-collar Bensalem, Pa., but the center of her childhood was a Pentacostal church in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood. Every Wednesday morning, she walked with the pastor past bars and discount stores canopied by train tracks. They huddled around prostitutes and drug addicts. She prayed so hard for them that tears rolled down her cheeks.
Then last summer, she announced that the Lord had told her to attend Bible school.
"She just went wherever the Lord was leading her," said Kathy DePalma, who ran the Christian day-care center where Johnson had worked.
When friends came to visit in Indianapolis, Johnson chattered about the college's football team, her new church and the young men who had caught her eye.
