Unnatural Causes
Why did a devoted San Ramon mom decide to end her own life and take her little girl with her?
MARTHA ROSS
Published:
In a home video made the year before Maegan Mundi died, she sits on the living room couch of her San Ramon home. She’s slender and attractive, with long brown hair and a voice that rings with warmth. Casually dressed in jeans and an oversize T-shirt, she’s holding hands with her fiancé, Jan Bottorff. The two are joking about how their home movie needs "character development" when Mundi’s daughter, a golden-haired little girl clad in just a diaper, climbs onto Mundi’s lap and coaxes her to play "fall away."
Mundi does a pantomime of falling off the couch, raising her arms overhead and collapsing forward. The little girl, whose name is Galadriel, giggles delightedly and asks Mumsy to "fall away" again. Mundi does it again and again, all the while sporting a sideways grin.
The video captures a sweet moment, a playful, affectionate interaction, with Mundi in one of the many roles she took on in life: that of loving mother. Bottorff wants to believe that Mundi wasn’t just playing a part, that she was truly happy when they made this video in September 2002. But he also knows that if her happiness was real, it didn’t last.
Hey Martha, they got my cousins in 2014, my friend Alicia Driscoll in 2004, my customer Dr. Fang in 2000, my employee in 2009, my customer Peter Haas in 2011, and Dr. Ringheim in 1986.
Heck there are more.
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