LINDA A. JOHNSON AP Business Writer TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — The first personal injury trial over a Pfizer Inc. drug linked to suicide ended abruptly Wednesday when the victim’s family accepted $50,000 from an anonymous donor to drop the case. The family’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, said Wednesday that he had just finished the first day of testimony Tuesday — including claims a private detective hired by Pfizer had threatened the first witness — when the offer was made to the 10-year-old daughter of Susan Bulger. Bulger had been taking Pfizer’s epilepsy drug Neurontin for unapproved uses — depression and rheumatoid arthritis — when she hung herself on Aug. 4, 2004, Lanier said. He said the daughter, who was five at the time, found her 39-year-old mother hanging from an electrical cord in the basement of their home in Peabody, Mass. “It was going to be a tough case for us to win,” said Lanier, because Bulger “had arguably (made) up to six suicide attempts” previously. The case, which was being heard in Boston, was permanently dismissed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Patty Saris. It is the first case to come to trial out of about 1,200 lawsuits alleging Neurontin led people to attempt or commit suicide, according to Lanier, a high-profile plaintiffs attorney who handled hundreds of lawsuits over Merck & Co.’s withdrawn painkiller Vioxx. New York-based Pfizer said Neurontin, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration and has been on the market since 1993, has been prescribed to millions of patients safely and effectively. Pfizer said there’s no evidence Neurontin, which is approved only for treating epilepsy seizures and nerve pain, causes suicidal behavior. However, Neurontin is one of 21 anti-seizure drugs that since December have been required by the FDA to carry warnings they slightly increase risk of suicidal behavior. Neurontin got generic competition in 2004, but had $2.7 billion in sales that year, according to Pfizer’s 2005 annual report. Bill Ohlemeyer, an outside attorney representing Pfizer in the case, said Bulger had been taking other medications for depression and substance abuse when she died. “There were a lot of difficult and challenging problems Susan Bulger was facing, and it’s very hard to connect this to a medicine she was taking for almost two years without complaining about it and that her doctors thought was helping her,” Ohlemeyer said of Neurontin. Lanier said the donor, a well-known plaintiff’s attorney he knows, asked to remain anonymous. The man had been sitting in the packed courtroom Tuesday, when Lanier and Ohlemeyer presented opening statements and Lanier began with testimony from opening witness David Franklin. Franklin, a former marketing employee of Warner-Lambert, now part of Pfizer, testified the company illegally urged doctors to prescribe Neurontin for unapproved uses. A scientist with a doctoral degree, Franklin said Pfizer sales representatives presented him to doctors as a fellow physician and he showed them a slide presentation indicating Neurontin worked against 13 conditions that weren’t unapproved uses. He said he quit after 4-1/2 months when he learned there were no data to support the claims. Lanier said in an interview that Pfizer made about $10 billion in Neurontin sales for unapproved uses from 1999 to 2004. In 2004, Pfizer paid $430 million in fines to settle allegations it marketed Neurontin for pain and psychiatric illnesses. Meanwhile, Franklin also testified that on Monday afternoon a private detective in Pfizer’s employ came to his home in the Boston suburb, blocked his driveway and threatened him, his wife and his young daughter. Lanier said Franklin and his family “severely shaken up” by the incident. After that testimony, the donor approached Lanier outside the courtroom and ultimately offered $50,000 for education and any counseling needed by the daughter, Regina Bulger. “He said, ‘I will pay that money to a trust account for her if she doesn’t have to go through the ordeal of a trial,'” Lanier recalled, adding he does not believe the man has any connection to Pfizer. “Isn’t that wild?” Lanier said. “I’ve never had anything like that happen before.” On Wednesday, Judge Saris issued an order barring anyone connected with Pfizer from contacting Franklin. Ohlemeyer said Pfizer will comply. He said the detective was hired to ask Franklin if he planned to testify and what he would say, a common practice during trials .”It sounds like this didn’t happen the way it should have happened,” Ohlemeyer said. “We apologized to (Franklin) for what happened.”