BURLEITH.

At around four o’clock this afternoon, Georgetown senior Kyle Wallace returned to his home in Burleith to find his housemate, fellow senior David McDaniels, lying dead following what appeared to be an extremely colorful overdose of Sharpie sniffing. The scene was described by on-site police as “horrifying, yet splendorous – like a great fallen peacock.”

“If I had known the problem was this serious, I’d have said something,” Wallace told the Heckler. “I mean, I’ve sniffed a Sharpie every once in awhile. Who hasn’t? You’re working on a banner or a high school science fair project, you crack one of those babies open, and you take a good whiff before you get to work filling in those bubble letters. We’ve all done it.”

Apparently McDaniels, an American History major with an Art minor, had been a closet Sharpie addict for years, unbeknownst to his housemates. “It started when he got a summer job at the local Staples,” McDaniels’ mother told our reporter on the scene. “Packs of Sharpies began disappearing from the store more and more often. Eventually they fired him. He promised us he had gotten clean when we sent him off for his freshman year, but I’ve seen those telltale stains on his hands and above his upper lip since then. Blue, green, metallic silver, whatever he could get his hands on. I guess I just shut my eyes to something I didn’t want to see.”

When we asked McDaniels’ father for comment, he said he was “surprised it was the Sharpies that got him, and not the cocaine.”