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Hello everyone and welcome to Real Crime Profile. It's Lisa and Jim coming to you.

Yeah, and Laura was just she could be here, but she's totally booked doing teaching advocacy work this week.

So Lisa and I wanted to talk to you about something.

Because we had a special message and a special tribute about something that we lost recently. Jim, do you want to tell everybody about?

Yeah, tell everybody about. His name is Steven Anthony Jeter and he was a kind and gentle soul. He was an amazing artist, very gifted, very meticulous.

And he was a lover of all cats and one dog. And he was painfully introverted, but maybe that added to his need to be independent.

But he died last Sunday, the 15th of November, 2020 at the age of 38, far, far too soon. I wanted to do this tribute to Steven not only because he was such a great man and a very close friend. I loved him. I still love him. But because he died of something I had never heard of before.

It's called Sudep, sudden unexplained death from epilepsy. He had epilepsy and from time to time, he would have seizures that were very horrible. I witnessed a bunch of them and I would just very difficult to see because it's so hard to help him through it. But he had a very non affected attitude about it. In other words, this was part of life. This was something he had to deal with, but it wasn't something that he complained about.

It's actually a syndrome like SIDS, Sudden, Infant, Death Syndrome. And what happens is that people who have epilepsy who suffer different kinds of seizures actually can suddenly die. They can have seizures all the time and actually, though they're dangerous and very difficult to go through, they can recover pretty quickly and get back to their normal life.

But these cases, what happens is that whether the position that they fall in or some factor contributes to them either not having as much oxygen as they need, like falling face down on a bed or a pillow or some other way. And even when these things happen in the hospital and the patients have immediate emergency assistance, they can't be revived.

So that's why it's unexpected. And I didn't know about this. I've known Stephen for more than six years and didn't know about the risk.

When you brought it up, Jim, and I went to look at the epilepsy.com website. I realized that this is what the young actor Cameron Boyce died from, even though he'd been dealing with his epilepsy. He had a sudden seizure.

I mean, seizures are scary to begin with, but to think that you really need somebody, it seems like around you living with you or having some kind of audio video monitoring device to make sure that you can get help quickly because unfortunately for Stephen, nobody was there when this happened.

And all that our listeners know, Jim found Stephen. And of course, was heartbroken that he couldn't help him. He couldn't.

I tried CPR, but and called 911. We in EMT's got there. He said he was already gone. And it just tore me up that I think it could have been preventable. But now learning about Sudep, it may have been more sudden than I thought.

And I just want to tell everybody who is out there who has friends or family members who have any kind of epilepsy or seizures, that this is a real thing. And they should actually do some research on it and put into place measures to monitor anybody.

Like there are life alert watches and pendants and monitoring systems as well as I know Apple Watch has a system that if you are having a seizure, it can start calling people on your emergency contact list or if you fall suddenly.

And there are other things that can be attached to a bed or other fixed object that a person with seizures might be on or near. And if you have a seizure, it also notifies emergency contacts.

So there are some technologies that can help and it's just such a shame. And in Steven's case, he really was a great man and and such a caring person. And he had a lot of difficulties because of his seizures.

They started when he was 15 and although there were years where he was able to control them through medication, there were times like this where he couldn't. And unfortunately, his very last post on Facebook was that he was starting to have seizures again, but he couldn't see his specialist because the message at their office said they were locked down because of COVID.

I don't know why doctors offices should be locked down for COVID. I mean, people still need medical help.

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