Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Thomas was engaged to someone else the day Carol, a pretty, down-to-earth woman with a soulful laugh, walked into El Greco, his cozy Capitol Hill restaurant, to apply for the pastry chef's job.

Carol, a native of Syracuse, N.Y., had graduated from the New England Culinary Academy, eventually making her way to Seattle in 1990.

"My biggest fear was I would die without feeling really in love," Thomas said. "Boom, she walked in, and I recognized it."

He handed her the job that day. And his heart.

They married three years later. Her "maid of honor" was her best friend from culinary school, Jim Goodall.

"We were on top of the world. We had everything for 5 1/2 years," said Thomas. They bought a house together, and she indulged her passion for gardening and yoga. They traveled together: Greece, Paris, Canada, California. They cooked together. Their customers became friends, and their friends, customers as their restaurant became an extension of their living room.

"It was like a family there," said Misha Whitfield, who worked at the restaurant and became one of Carol's closest friends.

Carol and Thomas tried to conceive for several years. On New Year's Eve 2000, they found out she was pregnant.

She was so excited, she called Goodall, who was in Paris, to tell him. It was midnight across the ocean, and as Carol shared the news of Alexander's nascent presence, fireworks lit the sky.

Alexander arrived Sept. 4, three days after their fifth anniversary. He was a breech birth, but she gritted out the pain. She didn't want a Cesarean. "She was very courageous," Thomas said. "I was so proud of her. She was a strong lady."

At first, Carol appeared to handle motherhood the way she handled the rest of her life.

"She was very passionate about everything she did," said Whitfield. "She was so strong-willed; she could do anything."

Then at four months, her outlook suddenly changed. Carol described it as a "veil coming down over her head."

Over the next few weeks, Carol became increasingly distraught. In the last weeks of her life, she was visiting Gallegos, who was also Alexander's doctor, nearly daily, looking for support. One time, she showed up at 9 a.m. for a 5 p.m. appointment. She stayed most of that day in the waiting room.

She told her husband she went there to feel safe. She was having disturbing thoughts.

On Jan. 4, 2001, her doctor's handwritten notes say Carol "worries b/c feels Tomas (sic) and Alexander would be better off without her — i.e. `bad thoughts in her head.' Carol says she would never/could never kill herself b/c she could not do that to her husband and her son. She denies a plan." The doctor also noted that Carol brought up having gone through depression years earlier and worried that things would get "out of control."

She went home and told her husband "I'm losing my mind." That night, he stayed up to watch her. "She stared at the ceiling the whole night," he said. He brought the baby to her, and although she let him breast-feed, she wouldn't cradle him in her arms.

In desperation, Thomas called the midwife. It was 5 a.m. Gallegos said she reassured him that although Carol should be seen by specialists, she would be OK. Thomas remembers being told not to worry; women go through this all the time.