Kiersten Cerveny: Before scandalous death, a life of glamour and achivement

It's still not entirely clear what killed New Jersey native Kiersten Cerveny.

Reports from the Daily News cite unnamed sources saying the 38-year-old's death in a Chelsea apartment was determined in a preliminary autopsy to be a likely cocaine overdose. Other reports say the autopsy was inconclusive — leading detectives to put together the pieces based on interviews and other evidence.

The details known of her last day, Saturday, have become notorious. As described by the Daily News:

Kiersten Cerveny, a married dermatologist, met with friends at a downtown hotel around 6:30 p.m. Saturday, sources told the Daily News. They drank, snorted cocaine and partied in her room, the sources said. The next 14 hours reveal a tragic tale of a 38-year-old Manhasset, L.I., mother of three — a dermatologist and assistant professor by day and a wild child by night.

According to that report and others — mostly citing unnamed law enforcement sources — Cerveney met up that night with a TV producer with whom she was friends at a Lower East Side bar, and took a cab to another man's home (ABC News describes it as the cab driver's home) in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Hours later, the two were reportedly seen dragging her to the front door of a West 16th Street building, blue and not breathing. The producer reportedly tried to perform and called 911. The Daily News also says he directed EMS to a lobby where Cerveny's body could be found, but both left before police arrived. She was reportedly found with bruises on her neck, but several reports have attributed those to an earlier medical issue.

She was pronounced dead shortly after.

Those last few hours are shrouded in mystery — reports form unnamed sources aren't entirely consistent. Some describe the producer as a friend, others say she'd been called his "girlfriend." Authorities haven't said much about the relationships among those involved. So far, no one has been charged.

But long before the 38-year-old's death made her famous, she lived a life of achievement.

She'd been valedictorian of her graduating class at Washington Township High School in Gloucester County in 1995, Philly.com reports.

She'd also won the $30,000 America's Junior Miss national scholarship program.

"We will always remember her warmth, her laughter and her desire to make a difference in this world," the program, now under then name Distinguished Young Women, wrote in a Facebook post Monday.

"I was so sad to hear this news today!" Carole Hegwood  wrote in response. "Kiersten was a joy to know!"

Several others wrote of how she'd guided them in the program, and was a welcoming incumbent for the next year's class.

According to Philly.com, she studied dance under Debra DiNote, 61, of Sewell.

"She was just so darn smart her entire life," the report quotes DiNote saying.

Cerveny graduated from Duke University magna cum laude. She got her medical degree from Tulane University.

According to her wedding announcement, she met Andrew Cerveny Jr. — a fellow dermatologist —in 2004 when they were both residents at the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. The two were married five years later at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. An earlier marriage had ended in divorce.

Cerveny was the chief of dermatology at Brooklyn Hospital Center and is an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

Friends quoted in several reports said they had trouble reconciling the details they've learned of Cerveny's last hours with the person they knew.

"We don't know what to believe," Martine Fabien, a medical assistant who had worked with Cerveny told Philly.com.