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Thursday, April 14, 2022

Dead at 44


According to the Los Angeles County Coroner, Mad Dog died in 2000 of an acute pulmonary thromboembolism brought on by IV drug use and high blood pressure.  It was only when I found this memorial on a genealogical website that I came to know that he had served in Vietnam.  He was buried in the National Cemetery at Riverside, California.

 

11 comments:

  1. Nice series today. I appreciate your work getting as much information you can find on Alexander. Back when he was working with AMG, I got the impression MD was gay -- or at least gay friendly. I can't help but wonder if that's why his time in the US Navy was cut short.

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    1. I suppose that might be the reason. We all know that being married to a woman doesn't preclude being gay. Plus, men were thrown out of the armed forces for homosexual activity who didn't necessarily consider themselves to be gay. Sexuality is so complicated.

      I rather enjoyed putting this one together, despite the lack of a "happily ever after" ending.

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    2. Heroin/opioid use was fairly common among soldiers during the Vietnam war. It was also assumed that it’s use stopped when most of the soldiers left Vietnam. Opioid addiction can be difficult to overcome for a small number of any population. Of course, there are few if any statistics or studies of this problem that any branch of the military has denied ever existed. It appears Mad Dog didn’t kick his habit.

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  2. If Mad Dog did pick up his heroin habit while in the service, he didn't kick it. The sort of use the Coroner described could not have been limited to his short stint in the Navy. Of course, it's also entirely possible that he never used while in the service. As for his time working for Mizer, drug use was not mentioned in the PP notes, which is more than we can say for a number of other models.

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  3. Some years ago, there was a website devoted to the "whatever happened to" of various male models. It was pretty depressing.

    Also, some states do not allow non-relatives to get death certificates until a certain period of time elapses. Louisiana for instance is 50 years. I guess CA is somewhat looser about that.

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    1. The document in which I found Mad Dog's cause of death wasn't a death certificate, strictly speaking. It was a summary of a Coroner's report, and it lacked a lot of the supporting demographic info (parents' names, place of birth, etc.) one expects on a death certificate.

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  4. Another link for Mad Dog: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/KWDZ-M4P

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    1. More links:
      https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72097212/alexander-thomas-mains
      https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Mains-460

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    2. Thanks, Jim. I knew about findagrave.com, but was surprised to see his younger spouse is also deceased.

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    3. A defect of FamilySearch is that the site won't make information visible to others unless the person is entered as dead.

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    4. Yeah, privacy issues, I suppose, but a lot of this stuff is public record.

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