what happened to the girls in le roy
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Very weird slice of life, that includes a cheerleader named Katie Krautwurst. Published in the New York Times MagazineTRANSCRIPT
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What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy
Gillian Laub for The New York TimesLydia Parker, foreground, at home with her sister. She got one of the bruises on her face when an uncontrollable tic causedher to hit herself with her cellphone.
By SUSAN DOMINUSPublished: March 7, 2012 387 Comments
Before the media vans took over Main Street, before theenvironmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor cameto take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and askingquestion after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleaderfrom Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knewsomething was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollablyand her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching afew weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of oneof the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering andthen later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Twoweeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and armswings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars,another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making thesame strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving schoolearly on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include awider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girlswho kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an olderwoman, age 36. Parents wept as their daughters stuttered at the dinner table. Teachersshut their classroom doors when they heard a din of outbursts, one cry triggering another,sending the increasingly familiar sounds ricocheting through the halls. Within a fewmonths, as the camera crews continued to descend, the community barely seemed torecognize itself. One expert after another arrived to pontificate about what was wrong in
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THE 6TH FLOOR BLOGBehind theCover Story:SusanDominus onInvestigatinga Mystery IllnessSusan Dominus discusses herarticle.
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Gillian Laub for The New York TimesKatie Krautwurst, a cheerleader, wasone of the first girls at the high schoolto come down with the unusual,debilitating symptoms.
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Le Roy, a town of 7,500 in Western New York that had long prided itself on the things itgot right. The kids here were wholesome and happy, their parents insisted — “cheerleadersand honor students,” as one father said — products of a place that, while not perfect, wasmade up more of what was good about small-town America than what was bad. Now,though, the girls’ writhing and stuttering suggested something troubling, either arisingfrom within the community or being perpetrated on it, a mystery that proved irresistiblefor onlookers, whose attention would soon become part of the story itself.
Le Roy’s East Main Street displays an impressive row ofgrand Victorians and Federalist-style homes built in the19th century, testament to the flour mills and salt minesthat made the town a comfortable place to live. After thatcame the Jell-O years, when that company and severalothers employed thousands of people in the area. But Jell-O and most of the rest of the factories took their workelsewhere by the 1960s, and now a good number of thosehistoric homes have been divided into two- or three-familyrentals, with peeling paint and rows of crooked mailboxesinside the foyer. Some houses look so beaten down byweather and disrepair that it comes as a surprise to see alight on inside. Le Roy is a working-class community withgood schools that attract people who work in nearbyRochester. But it is also a manufacturing town whoseprosperous days are behind it — the kind of place wherelocal politicians are always talking about how to bring backthe good old days.
Katie Krautwurst and her family live in one of the stately,well-preserved houses in town, a home her mother’sancestors built, its porch now decorated with semicircularAmerican flag banners and a child’s antique sled. At the topof a winding staircase is Katie’s room, a pink-and-yellowperch where she and Thera sat talking one late Februaryafternoon. The girls grew close a few years ago, when theymet through cheerleading and realized they both had acrush on the same guy. “How weird was that?” Theraasked, her voice going loud and her eyes going wide. Theraspeaks in italics and underlines; Katie, by contrast, is soreserved she could be mistaken for nonchalant. As theytalked, Thera was idly going through Katie’s walk-in closetto see what was new. Katie’s face showed a quick spasm, atwitch, every few minutes, subtle enough that you mightmiss it if you weren’t looking. Thera had a bruise on her leftleg from where she had fainted the evening before andlanded on her bedside table.
On the afternoon when Katie first started twitching, shewas at her boyfriend’s house. When the symptomsworsened, his mother called her mother, who told them tocall an ambulance and meet her at the emergency room inRochester. Paramedics strapped Katie onto the stretcher.“Then I couldn’t twitch, so it made it even worse, and I was
freaking out even more,” she said. Doctors at the hospital told Katie and her mother thatshe was having an anxiety attack. Katie was a straight-A student who admits she can beanxious at times. But her symptoms persisted, so she and her mother went back to thesame emergency room a few days later. This time, Katie’s mother, Beth Miller, a nurse,insisted they conduct more elaborate tests. After seven hours of testing that included anM.R.I. and a blood panel, the doctors told Miller what she already knew: her daughter hadtics.
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Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about the actress Maria
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A version of this article appeared in print on March 11, 2012, on page MM28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: WhatHappened to the Girls in Le Roy.
387 CommentsReaders shared their thoughts on this article.
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Schneider in the Lives They Lived Issue.
Editor: Lauren Kern
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 11, 2012
An article on Page 28 this weekend about teenage girls in a New York town afflicted witha twitching disorder misstates the number of times the mother of one was laid off in thelast year. It is two, not three.
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Ego Nemo Not far from here
March 12, 2012 at 1:07 p.m. RECOMMENDED 13
It is stressful to live in a part of America that used to be so rich and isnow so poor. And it is sad that a community, so unable to face its ownpresent-day problems, would waste such energies on worrying about a40-year-old train derailment.
And it is a shame that the affluent world outside of Western New York,would bring in its self-serving hucksterism and fashionable pseudo-scientific bunk, on the pretense of 'helping' these terribly damagedpeople.
And it is a crime that Americans living in other places would watch allthis for their entertainment.
You'd have to be sick yourself, or a terribly foolish person, to think theroot of all of this isn't clearly 40 years of economic decline and a lot ofpsychological stress.
Ashy Columbus, OHI think this disease may be strongly related to the chemicals in theenvironment and tap water. Tests should be carried out to detect toxic
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