The slippery slope of assisted suicide
Assisted suicide not just about the incurably ill
Michelle Carter met Conrad Roy on a trip to Florida in 2012. The two Boston-area teenagers saw each other occasionally afterwards; mostly they exchanged emails and text messages. Roy was popular, an honours student, athletic. But he suffered from depression and anxiety disorders and had previously attempted suicide.
In the spring of 2014 he began having similar thoughts. Carter initially told him to seek treatment, but at some point in July decided he would be better off dead. Over the last two weeks of his life she sent him dozens of texts encouraging him to kill himself (“You always say you’re gonna do it, but you never do… You just need to do it”), including helpful tips on how it might be done.
On the night of July 12 Roy attached a hose to the exhaust of his pickup truck, fed the other end into the cab, and got in. She listened on the phone as he took his last gasps. Tellingly, when he briefly had second thoughts and got out of the truck, she told him to get back in. A Massachusetts court convicted her earlier this month of involuntary manslaughter.
The verdict will undoubtedly be appealed, and raises many issues. She was only 17 at the time, had her own history of psychological troubles, and was on a drug that might have made her delusional. Her degree of responsibility for his decision will also be debated, as will the appropriateness of the involuntary manslaughter charge.
“I placed my mother in a facility I researched never once considering she would be a victim of such a despicable act.
“I ask why, because she didn’t eat all the blueberry pie and ice cream?”
David Silcox, whose father, James Silcox, was murdered in 2007, wrote, “I simply feel guilty for not being able to protect my father as he had protected me.”
Debora Rivers said her grandmother, Mary Zarawinski, hated the nursing home when she first went there. There are a lot of old people here, she told her niece, even though Zarawinski was one of the oldest residents in the facility. “She made it nice for everybody there,” Rivers said outside court.
She also noted that Wettlaufer had described Zarawinski as “‘fun and feisty’ — and she was.”
“The woman lived to be 96 years old for God’s sake,” Rivers said. “We have no way of knowing how long her life might have been. We were pretty sure she was going to make it to 100 and so was she.”
Beverly Bertram, who is Wettlaufer’s sole living victim, wrote about the physical pain she was in after the nurse injected her with insulin with the intent to kill her.
“It is really hard to describe, but I knew I was dying,” she wrote in her statement. “I was doubled over in pain in my stomach ... Just such pain. My whole body hurt ... I thought I was screaming, but I was just moaning I guess.” Bertram wrote that she has become a recluse since the incident.
“I’m afraid of my own shadow. I was afraid she would come back and finish the job,” she said. “I truly think sometimes I’d be better off if she did her deed.”
Most chilling, perhaps, was the account of Sharon Young, the niece of victim Helen Young.
She said she recalled picking up her late aunt’s belongings at the Caressant Care nursing home in Woodstock and embracing Wettlaufer — the nurse she’d later learn had killed Helen.
“I’m left with the image of my aunt’s last painful hours and the image of hugging and thanking her killer,” Sharon Young said.
Wettlaufer used insulin trying — and in most cases succeeding — to kill vulnerable victims in her care at three Ontario long-term care facilities and a private home.
Her crimes began in 2007 and didn’t stop until she confessed to the killings at a psychiatric hospital in Toronto last fall.
In a lengthy video statement she gave to police last fall, she said she felt a “red surging” well up in her chest that was relieved after she completed a kill.
She believed she was an instrument of God at times, but also killed because some residents were too much work, too burdensome.
On Monday, Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi and Health Minister Eric Hoskins said a formal inquiry will be held into the circumstances of the deaths.