Bob Arihood of Neither More Nor Less suggests that the death of East Villager and Tompkins Square Park habitue Lesia Pupshaw this weekend may have been the result of beatings she suffered in and around the Park Friday night at the hands of "young Hispanic male park attackers." Witnesses have told him that she was conked with a bottle, then kicked and beaten with sticks, and further pummeled as she made her way home. Pupshaw was a heroin user -- she reportedly overdosed as recently as the day before the attack; in December 2000 she
told the Voice that she had kicked the drug nine months earlier -- and this may lend suspicion that heroin was the actual cause of her death. Pupshaw went to the hospital Friday night but "impatiently left," Arihood reports, and went back home, where she passed away.
"If Lesia Pupshaw had been a banker," says Jeremiah Moss of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, "stumbling home to her condo drunk and high on coke, it would be called a murder, not an overdose. And you would have read about her by now in the New York Times. But she was a heroin user and a 'crusty' kid. So you haven't." Photo via NMNL.
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