PERSPECTIVES
“Okay,” Maya remembered saying. “Just tell him to leave, and you come upstairs. It’s
your birthday.”
“No, no, I’m just gonna go.”
“Why would you leave?” Maya pleaded. “I want to spend time with you. Don’t go.”
“No, I’m just gonna go,” McHenry repeated. Then she hung up. Maya couldn’t get
hold of her sister again. Nearly 10 months later, Maya said she still doesn’t know who
McHenry went downstairs to find.
After her sister left, Maya wasn’t interested in sticking around the Dream. She had
mixed feelings about McHenry bailing and going silent; her sister was drunk, which
worried her, but she also knew McHenry was “horrible with her phone,” she said. This
exact scenario had played out before. She assumed McHenry had just gone out with
other friends—like the one she’d gone downstairs to find—and would eventually crash
with them. Maya herself had decided to sleep at a friend’s place after leaving the club.
People, she reasoned, stayed out all night in New York City.
cHenry’s body was found at just after five in the morning.
No one called 911, a New York Police Department spokeswoman told ELLE.
Police officers in the area just happened across her corpse, draped on a drab
corner of an isolated overpass above a Bronx interstate, nearly nine miles but a
world away from the luxe Dream she’d come from.
The officers found McHenry unconscious and unresponsive. Emergency medical
responders pronounced her dead at the scene before taking her to a nearby hospital.
The cops noted that she was lying face up, dressed in what they described as a pink top,
underwear, and sneakers. She had a “pocketbook,” their report indicated, and inside the
“pocketbook” were “alleged drugs.”
As Maya got ready for work that morning, she continued texting and calling her sis-
ter. Shortly after she got to her office—a creative agency in Tribeca—she got a call from
their mom. Jennifer asked if the girls had had fun the previous night; she told Maya she
hadn’t heard from her sister, who was supposed to catch a flight back to L.A. that day.
Maya hesitated. And then she lied. “Yeah, she’s fine. We had such a good time to-
gether,” she said. At that moment, Maya still believed McHenry had probably slept over
at a friend’s or a guy’s place and her phone died. It wasn’t a crazy idea. Both sisters had
accidentally missed flights before from oversleeping after a night out. She didn’t want
their mom to worry.
But then Maya got a call from NYPD detectives with “urgent business” to discuss.
She told them to meet her downstairs, but before they arrived, Maya’s dad called. Her
sister was in the hospital, he said. She wasn’t going to wake up. At first, Maya didn’t un-
derstand what he was saying. She was standing on a sidewalk, waiting for the police and
screaming at her dad. When the panic hit, it swept her into a foggy madness; nothing
made sense and nothing felt real. Passers-by stared as she broke down in a coworker’s
arms. Someone called an ambulance.
Doug McHenry had learned of his older daughter’s death in an even more disturb-
ing way: Earlier that morning, a reporter had called him at home, asking if he had any
comment.
McHenry’s death made the news instantly. Through her grief, Maya was dumbfound-
ed. She had never thought of her family as famous. EJ Johnson’s reality show had only
aired for one season, and the sisters had barely appeared on it. Yet here was McHenry
being described as a “reality TV personality” and “star” by national news outlets. Here
were paparazzi hiding in bushes near the family’s L.A. home. Here were stories about
her mother collapsing and being rushed to the hospital when she learned her daughter
had died. (As of March, her mom was still at a treatment center, Maya said.)
McHenry’s death was immediately suspected to be drug related, and it was reported
as such. An autopsy would later determine she had died of a cocaine, alcohol, and her-
oin overdose. But it would also include a revelation that drove McHenry’s death firmly
into entertainment tabloid territory: She was pregnant, about 20 weeks along, and she
hadn’t told anyone.
Since learning about her pregnancy, McHenry’s family and friends have become
convinced Lyric didn’t know about the baby. They say she didn’t look pregnant. They
say she definitely would have told someone. They say a lot of women don’t get their pe-
riods every month for a lot of reasons. And no, they say, they don’t know who the father
is. Even beyond the pregnancy, McHenry’s loved ones have tried hard to control the
narrative of Lyric’s life and death. They repeat the same impressive résumé details and
M
THE FINAL POSTS
Lyric McHenry’s
Instagram account is now
a tribute to her life.IN MARTHA’S
VINEYARD,
AUGUST 2018.FROM
LEFT: WITH
FRIENDS
ELISA AND EJ
JOHNSON,
KYLE BRYAN,
AND MIKEY
STENNIS
IN MIAMI,
JULY 2018.LYRIC (RIGHT)
WITH HER
SISTER, MAYA,
AS CHILDREN.LYRIC (RIGHT)
WITH MAYA IN
APRIL 2016. Co
u
rte
syof^
the
Mc
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(
4
)