Desert `Mercy Killing' Raises Doubts With Police

NEW MEXICO investigators delve into how a rite-of-passage trek could become an adventure in terror that leaves one man dead and his best friend charged with murder.

BOSTON - They were two young men on a cross-country trek. Together they went into the harsh desert of New Mexico's Rattlesnake Canyon. Only one came out alive.

The story told by aspiring writer Raffi Kodikian, 25, beside the grave he dug for his friend David Coughlin, 26, was "extremely bizarre," investigators said.

In a diary that documented it all - and now is a prime exhibit in an unfolding murder mystery - he wrote of being parched and panicked in the desert, of a campsite turned into a burial site and of how his best friend beseeched him to take his life.

The tale raises questions about how a rite-of-passage adventure became a ritual of terror - how two ostensibly smart young men could find themselves in a state of such unyielding fear that mercy killing appeared to be the only way out. To complicate matters, the only witness is dead.

"I killed him," Kodikian told rescuers on Aug. 8 in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southeastern New Mexico. He also said, "I hope you brought water."

Eddy County, N.M., Sheriff M.A. "Chunky" Click is accustomed to tales of tenderfoot campers overwhelmed by the park's hostile terrain, but he was unprepared for Kodikian's account of the desperate distress that, he insists, led his friend to beg him to end his misery.

Kodikian contends that stabbing his friend twice in the chest with a hunting knife was an act of mercy because Coughlin believed himself to be dying of thirst.

"I don't know too many people who would do away with their best friend," Click said, "even under adverse circumstances."

An autopsy report lends credence to Kodikian's story. At the time of death, according to a New Mexico medical examiner, Coughlin was moderately to severely dehydrated.

Though the New Mexico summer has been "hotter than hell" and the two campers probably were quite thirsty, Click said in an interview that he doubted that their circumstances were all that dire.

"There's no question in my mind that if Mr. Coughlin had not been killed he would be on his way to Santa Barbara (Calif.) right now, starting his new life," Click said.

Kodikian, of Boston's West Roxbury section, was charged last week with an open count of murder, which allows authorities to specify the degree of charges later. He was released on $50,000 bail, paid by his father, who owns a rental-services firm in Pennsylvania.

The slender Kodikian - who in 1998 wrote several free-lance stories for the Boston Globe about a solo cross-country trek that took him to New Mexico, among other places - faces a pretrial hearing today in Carlsbad, N.M.

Kodikian is being represented by Gary Mitchell, a criminal defense attorney who has kept many clients in New Mexico from the death penalty. Mitchell did not return calls to his office.

Because the killing took place in a national park, the case may be turned over to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

In the meantime, county Prosecutor Les Williams has indicated that a key piece of evidence will be a journal kept by Kodikian, with several entries said to have been written by Coughlin.

The journal describes how the pair set out late last month from Kodikian's hometown of Doylestown, Pa., near Philadelphia. Their destination was Santa Barbara, where Coughlin was to begin graduate school next month.

Theirs was a well-worn path, a pilgrimage made equally of party sites and shrines of popular culture. In the tradition of countless young men before them, the clean-cut, articulate pair used their last-boyhood-fling excursion as an excuse to stop shaving and sample the vagabond life.

Traveling in Coughlin's red 1994 Mazda, their expedition took them to Nashville, where they partied and made a side visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley's home. They went to New Orleans and to Austin, Texas.

The pair met five years ago through women they were dating who were best friends. Coughlin, raised in the Boston suburb of Wellesley, was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

As a journalism major at Boston's Northeastern University, Kodikian worked for several months as an editorial assistant at The Boston Globe. After graduation, Coughlin had been working for the town of Wellesley, while Kodikian worked for a Boston financial firm.

New Mexico authorities have seized Kodikian's journal, and to the consternation of some involved in the case, have also quoted freely from it. The diary includes a hand-drawn map of the routes leading to the Carlsbad area, the same region Kodikian visited a year earlier.

The two young men appear to have spent at least two days at the site where they were found, just 240 feet from the main trail and a mile and a half from their car. They were out of water, but not food. Kodikian was asleep when rescuers found him. They described him as lucid and strong enough to have buried his friend in the shallow grave he dug himself.

The lost-in-the-desert theme is eerily reminiscent of Kodikian's two-part Boston Globe travel story, in which he wrote: "All I saw in front of me was a sheet of white. The sand felt like a sand-blaster on my bare legs, and I had lost my sense of direction."

The same motif runs through a classic of the lore of hiking and backpacking. "The Man Who Walked Through Time" tells the story of two friends who nearly die of dehydration in the Grand Canyon. It is not known if Coughlin or Kodikian read Colin Fletcher's work of fiction.

What is known, Click says, is that the first entry in Kodikian's journal for Aug. 8 reads "I killed and buried my best friend today."

Dehydration can produce disorientation and delirium, back-country experts say. But even if Coughlin did implore Kodikian to end his suffering, mercy killing is not legally defensible anywhere in the United States.

"Legally there is no such thing as mercy killing. There is just homicide, and the only question about that is justification," said lawyer George Annas, a specialist in medical ethics at Boston University.

At a memorial service for Coughlin last weekend in Wellesley, some mourners expressed doubts that their friend would have given up. Wellesley Deputy Police Chief Terry Cunningham called Coughlin a friend and colleague who was bright and resourceful. Coughlin was strong and worked out regularly, he said.

"David was not a quitter," Cunningham said.

But Michael Coughlin, the dead man's brother, expressed empathy for Kodikian. "This is very, very important to me," he told the 400 mourners who crowded into a Roman Catholic church to remember his brother. "Everybody here, please say a prayer for Raffi because I know how much he loved David, and I know how much my brother loved him."