SABRINA SEELIG seemed too young to die.


Just 22, she lived in a railroad flat in Bushwick, a part of Brooklyn that at the time was cheap but not yet hip, with a roommate who worked at the Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Seelig worked as a waitress in bistros on the Lower East Side while writing a novel and studying classics at Hunter College.


One night she stayed up all night translating a Latin text into English for a college paper. At 4 a.m. she e-mailed her professor saying she would deliver it in person. During the all-nighter, Ms. Seelig took Ephedra, a stimulant diet drug that had been banned by the Food and Drug Administration three years earlier, and had a few beers. When she felt sick, she called Poison Control for help, and spoke very clearly, a recording of the call shows. She arrived by ambulance at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, long regarded as one of the most troubled hospitals in the city, at 11:05 a.m. on May 30, 2007, conscious and alert but complaining of vomiting and dizziness.


She was given a sedative that put her into a deep sleep, and her wrists were tied to the bed. None of her friends or relatives knew that she was there, and medical records show no measurements of her vital signs for hours that afternoon, suggesting that she was left unattended by the medical staff.


By that evening she was brain damaged and on life support, with little hope of recovering. She died six days later.


Ms. Seelig’s case brings to mind the death of Libby Zion, an 18-year-old Bennington College freshman who died in 1984, eight hours after being admitted to New York Hospital, where she had been sedated and tied down. Ms. Zion’s death led to changes in the training of young doctors across the country, in a campaign led by her father, Sidney Zion, a well-connected New York writer.


But Ms. Seelig’s grieving parents, Warren Seelig and Sherrie Gibson, carried on their crusade in private — and without the satisfaction of knowing that her death had changed the way medicine was practiced.


How could a 22-year-old woman die so abruptly? How could a youthful misstep have had such disastrous consequences? Those are questions the Seeligs still struggle to answer after five years. Because their daughter was alone at the hospital, they are left with only a sketchy record of her treatment and no way to know what she felt during her final hours. Her mother and her estate sued Wyckoff Hospital and staff members who had treated Ms. Seelig for malpractice, but they lost after an emotionally grueling four-week trial in the spring.


Asked what her daughter’s biggest mistake might have been, Ms. Gibson said it was being young, carefree, adventurous and trusting.


“She had a wonderful innocent quality about her,” said her friend Erin Durant, an aspiring songwriter who worked as a waitress with Ms. Seelig. “I don’t mean that in a naïve way — that’s a terrible word to use, innocent, but she was very, like, kind but real.”


SABRINA was the younger of two sisters, and when she was little, her family lived in Philadelphia, where her parents taught at the University of the Arts. When she was 11, they moved to Rockland, Maine, a lobster town and artists’ colony. She and her sister, Ashley, went skinny-dipping in the granite quarries. Their mother designed and sold clothing. Their father taught art and made ethereal sculptural forms that have been installed at places like the Pennsylvania Convention Center and the new American Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia.


When she was 13, she wanted to start an ice cream stand. Her father helped her build it, and they named it Lulu’s, after their dog. The stand became a real business, a local phenomenon, and her sister still runs it today, with a small altar to Sabrina. “It has an authenticity about it, and Sabrina loved that kind of thing,” Mr. Seelig said. “She is an old soul,” he added, speaking of his younger daughter, still, in the present tense.


As a teenager, she directed plays, and her best friend, Caitlin FitzGerald, now an actress, starred in them. She graduated from high school a year early, in 2001, and took time off to travel before spending two years at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., attracted by its reputation for creativity. Then, restless again, she moved to New York, where her sister was in art school.


Ms. Seelig found an apartment at 70 St. Nicholas Avenue, five blocks from Wyckoff Hospital, and filled it with inspirational quotations from literature, shells from Maine and two paintings by her sister — “the only ones she ever liked,” Ashley said, adding, “It was, like, extremely bohemian, like, oh, come on.”


She drank Earl Grey tea with steamed milk, and wore flowing thrift-shop dresses.


Ms. Durant took her to the office of The Brooklyn Rail, a free, nonprofit journal of arts and politics based in Greenpoint, in a building just over the Pulaski Bridge from Long Island City, Queens, on a street so desolate it belongs in film noir. For Ms. Seelig, it was a sanctuary, almost like going home.