Diana Caroline Borysenko was a happy-go-lucky woman whose penchant for breaking social norms may have led to her death.
The 44-year-old was found lifeless on the evening of Aug. 5 near Elm Street and Ham Lane in Lodi, police said. Her head had become trapped in the door of a clothing donation bin.
As bizarre as the circumstances sound, Borysenko wasn’t alone in meeting such a strange fate.
A woman in Plantation, Florida, died similarly in June. The same for Petaluma woman in 2018. And a man in Los Angeles the year before.
The problem is widespread enough that it was the subject of a 2020 study published on the National Institutes for Health website that examined five similar deaths in Canada. It recommended design changes for certain bins that are “potentially dangerous devices.”
It’s not clear what led Borysenko to stick her head in the bin. Most likely, she was hoping to fish out free clothing. She was, after all, living a rootless life. She had been involved in mostly petty crimes to earn quick cash, an indication she may have been scraping by financially. She had been diagnosed with a mental illness and had been busted for illegal narcotics.
Life had never been easy — not even from the start.
Diana Caroline and her brother Woodrow had been abandoned by their birth parents. When she was 5 years old, the state turned the siblings over to the care of Lynn and Henry Borysenko in the tiny town of Ainsworth, Nebraska. They were among the more than dozen kids that the Borysenkos fostered over the years, many of them with disabilities.
In the Borysenko household, Diana Caroline was known by the shortened version of her middle name. She was simply Carrie. Lynn told Stocktonia that Carrie was a joyful tyke for whom “everything was fun as far as she was concerned.” She would share her playhouse with other kids. She would wake up after going to bed and exclaim “let’s go get ice cream!” Then they would.
The Borysenkos adopted Carrie and her brother. With it came the family name.
Warning signs emerge
As she entered her teens, however, Carrie started exhibiting strange behavior. She would go through a period of being lively and engaged then fall into a bout of withdrawal and despair — slumping on the couch or retreating to her room to watch TV.
One night she planned to go out wearing a coat over her shirt and jewelry. Below, only panties. “No pants, no skirt or anything else,” according to Lynn. She kept her home.
Though rebellion is part of the teenage credo, Carrie took it to the next level, her adoptive mom said. She incessantly broke rules and flouted social norms. She wouldn’t comb her hair and failed to recognize the inappropriateness of flatulence in public.
Carrie was diagnosed as bipolar and saw a psychiatrist. She was prescribed lithium to try to even out the highs and lows. It helped but like for so many similarly situated, the challenge was to try to keep her on her meds. Life with her was seldom easy, according to Lynn.
‘She had a terrible life’
Carrie left home at 16 to live with her birth father about 50 miles away.
“It just didn’t work out. She had a terrible life,” Lynn said. Carrie entered a group home for wayward boys and girls. That apparently didn’t last long, either. She hooked up with a boyfriend, Lynn said. They had a baby.
Men were drawn to Carrie. She was uncommonly pretty. Once when she was about 14, the family went camping. A boy kept walking by their campsite hoping the attract the attention of Carrie, who was laying on a picnic bench, Lynn said.
Carrie moved to Nebraska’s capital, Lincoln, and became hooked on drugs, according to Lynn.
In 2010, the Lincoln Journal Star ran a short story about Carrie and her apparent boyfriend, listed as a transient a year older at 29. The two were arrested for printing fake $50 bills and using one to buy pizza and breadsticks. Besides forgery, they were also charged with possession of methamphetamine. A year later, another story said the boyfriend had been sentenced to time behind bars and that Carrie was due to be sentenced.
Her troubles would continue when she moved to Northern California. Various websites that glean arrest information from public websites show a drug possession case from August 2018 in Sacramento that led to three successive warrants. There were two arrests in 2023. One was for urinating or defecating in public in San Joaquin County. The other involved trespassing and possession of controlled substance arrest in Rancho Cordova. To cap it off, she was busted for throwing a substance at a vehicle earlier this year. Just what kind of substance isn’t make clear.
Death by donation bin
Yet none of her anti-social crimes would appear to have figured in her death. No cause of death has been disclosed but the NIH study said that in the five cases it investigated, the victims suffocated from the pressure exerted by the door of the bin or the opening pressing on their the chest and/or neck.
Lynn said it wouldn’t have been surprising that Carrie was reaching for items in a donation bin. She loved thrift stores and garage sales.
Lynn, who had always cared about Carrie’s safety, said she had done her best to keep tabs on her whereabouts, but it wasn’t easy. She knew Carrie had gone to California but not much more.
She recognized that her adopted daughter “was living a scattered life.”
A scattered life that ended in a donation bin.