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4/29/2008 3:33 AM

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Doug Carpenter died a week ago of pneumonia, a complication from severe head injuries sustained when he was a young man of 23. Carpenter was 46 when he died, but his physical death came nearly 23 years after he was brutally assaulted outside a tavern on Second Street in California Borough. There was an investigation, but no suspects emerged.

A former high school dropout who turned his life around, Carpenter was a senior accounting major at California State University when he was beaten around the head and face and left lying in the grass behind the former John Angelo's Tavern, where he had been the night before.

A retired California resident, Sam Koban Sr., a soda-can recycler, discovered the unconscious man at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 29, 1986, and called police. Carpenter was flown by medical helicopter to a Pittsburgh hospital, where he underwent hours of surgery to relieve pressure on his brain caused by swelling and cranial bleeding.

He spent two months at Allegheny General Hospital before he was admitted to a rehabilitation center in Erie, where he stayed for a year before being released into the care of his mother, Dorothy Carpenter, at the family home on Statement Avenue in the Pancake section of South Strabane Township. Dorothy, now a retired nurse, cared for his every need for two years before moving him to Washington County Health Center.

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That's where he lived in a vegetative state for the past 18 years, before pneumonia and failing lungs claimed his life last Tuesday.

"Doug never woke up. He may have never had a conscious thought after he was beaten up," Dorothy said last Thursday at the Neal funeral home on East Maiden Street.

"People have come up to me and said that God works miracles, but the only miracle that he worked with Doug is that I've been allowed to live all these years, because, without me, what would he have done?

"I visited him every day at the health center, sometimes two hours, sometimes eight hours. If he could have somehow known, he would have realized that he hadn't been abandoned."

Chief Rick Encaperna, a California Borough patrolman at the time, said the Carpenter assault case has never been closed.

"As soon as we learned the young man had died, the case moved from assault to homicide," Encaperna said Monday.

"We're only a small department, so we had to call in the state police for assistance," he added.

Washington County Coroner Tim Warco confirmed the new status of the case.

"If anybody has any information about the case, please call California police," Warco said. "That's all that can be done until a suspect is identified."

Contact Byron at bsmialek@observer-reporter.com.

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