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Daniel Auster

The Life and Death of Daniel Auster, a Son of Literary Brooklyn

by Sonal Shukla

One April morning, a 44-year-old man named Daniel Auster was discovered unconscious on a platform in a Brooklyn subway station as riders waited for the G train. He was taken to the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where six days after being taken off of life support, he passed away.

Daniel Auster, a DJ and photographer who had a history of addiction, was the stepson of novelist Siri Hustvedt and the son of writers Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, making him a member of New York literary aristocracy. He had been charged in the death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby, eleven days prior to his passing.

While under his care, Ruby had passed away on November 1, 2021. The baby was awake and healthy when Mrs. Auster left their Brooklyn apartment on Bergen Street that morning, according to Zuzan Smith, a 26-year-old graphic designer. Mr. Auster claimed in a deposition that he had injected heroin into himself before falling asleep next to his daughter. According to a police report, when the man awoke, Ruby was “blue, lifeless, and unresponsive.”

Before dialing 911, he attempted to revive her by administering Narcan, a medication used to treat opioid overdoses. At the nearby NewYork-Presbyterian-Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, Ruby was declared dead. Her death was brought on by acute heroin and fentanyl intoxication. On how she ingested the drugs, law enforcement officials have not made any comments.

Daniel Auster A Murder in Clubland

Daniel Auster spent his adolescence in the club kid scene that flourished at rave hotspots like Limelight and the Tunnel. He was present when party promoter Michael Alig and his roommate Robert Riggs killed drug dealer Andre Melendez in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment.

Although it’s unclear exactly what Daniel did during the murder, who was 18 at the time, the incident left a lasting impression on him and followed him throughout his life. His involvement in the crime was eventually forgotten, but after his arrest and passing, rumors that his last name may have earned him legal leniency reappeared.

He belonged to the club kids, a group of eccentric downtown individuals who founded the Limelight, a club housed in a former stone church in Chelsea. They carried ecstasy-filled children’s lunchboxes while partying while wearing glitter and platform heels.

By night, he partied at the Limelight in front of cage dancers while frequently carrying a paperback copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” He quickly came under the control of Mr. Alig, the ringleader of the Indiana suburbia club kids. Teenagers flocked to Mr. Alig’s disorderly utopia as he ruled the Limelight and hosted wild parties in subway stations and trucks.

James St. James, a former club kid and author of the 1999 memoir “Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland,” described Daniel as “a wild child.” When Michael and he first met, it was at a rave. Michael rushed up to me and announced, “I’ve just met the love of my life. Then he dragged this boy over.

Meth and ketamine took the place of ecstasy, and Mr. Alig developed a heroin addiction, which changed his life. In this setting, on March 17, 1996, Daniel found himself in Mr. Alig’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Although different accounts of what happened next have been given, this is the generally accepted version. What happened next has been told with variations, but this is the generally accepted account.

Due to his propensity for donning enormous feathered wings, Mr. Melendez, a club kid known as “Angel,” had been left with a sizable debt as a result of Mr. Alig’s drug use. When Mr. Melendez arrived at the apartment to retrieve his money, the two men started fighting. Soon after, Mr. Riggs joined the fight and struck Mr. Melendez in the head with a hammer. Then, after pouring Drano down Mr. Melendez’s throat and taping his mouth shut, Mr. Alig choked him to death.

Read more: Barry Bremen, Professional Impostor, Dies at 64

The deceased was put in a bathtub and left to rot on ice for days while Mr. Alig continued to party with his friends. He finally sprayed Calvin Klein Eternity on the corpse to cover up the smell while he dismembered the body in a heroin haze. The body was then thrown into the Hudson River by the men. In exchange for his silence, they allegedly gave Daniel, who was using drugs in the apartment, $3,000 of Mr. Melendez’s money.

Captured on the Page

Soon after Daniel Auster was born in 1977, the second New York story to which he was connected started to unfold on the page.

He gave his father years of inspiration, which he used to write several books about him before he eventually stopped.

His stepmother, Ms. Hustvedt, wrote a book about a teenage drug addict who becomes involved in a homicide that is eerily similar to the Melendez murder after the crime. 

His mother, Ms. Davis, has written countless short stories and essays that examine nearly every aspect of everyday life, including parenthood, but she has never created a character that is similar to Daniel.

In 1982, Daniel’s first literary appearance was in his father’s memoir “The Invention of Solitude,” in which he was depicted as a young boy. The book explores Mr. Auster’s strained relationship with his father, with Daniel serving as a Proustian vehicle for the author’s self-discovery. It signaled Mr. Auster’s entry as a fearless postmodern voice in American literature, and the motif of the father’s absence and the son’s search would recur frequently in all of his works.

After divorcing Mr. Auster, Ms. Davis wed Alan Cote, an abstract painter. She started out as a professor at Bard College and translated Proust and Flaubert. The author photo for her book “The End of the Story,” in which she smiles easily for the camera, bears the credit “by Daniel Auster,” and was taken in 1995 when Daniel was 17 years old.

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