Man upset by wife’s illness kills them both at hospital

VALHALLA, N.Y.—A man who said he wanted to end his ailing wife’s suffering shot her to death in her bed at a suburban New York hospital Wednesday and then killed himself, police said.

Richard DeLucia, 71, left a note at the couple’s condo indicating he was distraught about how his wife, Ann, 70, was suffering and wanted to put a stop to her ordeal, Westchester County police spokesman Kieran O’Leary said.

Then the husband went to his wife’s room at Westchester Medical Center with a licensed .38-caliber revolver, fired a single shot that killed his wife and then took his own life with another shot, police said. No one else was in the room at the time, authorities said.

Ann DeLucia, whose medical condition wasn’t immediately revealed, was found in her bed and her husband was found on the floor of her fourth-floor room at the Valhalla hospital, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, police said.

At the couple’s condo building in Yorktown Heights, neighbors absorbed the news with dismay.

“Everybody’s just shocked,” resident Valeria Tassone said, but “whatever took place is their business.”

The gunfire prompted a brief lockdown of a major suburban medical center that cares for tens of thousands of people per year. Jatziri Escobar, a patient who arrived at the hospital shortly after 9 a.m., told The Journal News she was in a first-floor room when staffers ran through the building, alerting patients about the active shooting.

“I was kinda scared, but one of the officers told me to relax and all would be OK,” said Escobar, 22, of Elmsford.

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson ■ A Westchester Medical Center security guard directs traffic as a Westchester County police car pulls out of the driveway to the main entrance of the hospital Wednesday in Valhalla, N.Y. A man shot his wife, who was a patient, and then killed himself at the hospital Wednesday, police said.