NO SERIOUSLY, HE WAS BEGGING TO DIE :

Mother Is Charged in a Healthy Son's Suicide (JOHN W. FOUNTAIN, April 24, 2002, NY Times)

On a cool spring night, young Patrick and Jennifer Holey gathered some blankets and pillows, stopped at McDonalds for dinner in Lansing, then went looking for a place to kill themselves.

But there was at least one other person in the car, the police say. Now, Mr. Holey's mother, Kathleen Kay Holey, is charged with two counts of assisted suicide.

The authorities say she drove Patrick, 19, and his wife, Jennifer, also 19, to the farmhouse on April 9, and handed them enough painkillers to kill themselves before leaving them for dead. Although his wife survived, Mr. Holey did not.

Prosecutors said Ms. Holey, 42, is the first person other than Dr. Jack Kevorkian to be charged with assisted suicide since a state law was passed in 1998 to stop the so-called Doctor of Death.

"Maybe it never crossed anybody's mind that somebody would try to help two perfectly healthy people kill themselves," the Clinton County prosecutor. Charles Sherman, said.

For one thing, it's awfully hard to see any moral difference between this and any other assisted suicide. All these folks who think you not only ought to be able to kill yourself but to make someone help you had better prepare to justify stories like this one.

For another, as we become the kind of culture in which you are allowed (and maybe expected or required) to kill even family members, it will become ever more difficult to distinguish between murder and suicide. Though we'd all like to think that violent crime is mainly a random phenomenon, the fact remains that most violence occurs between people who know and perhaps love (or loved) one another. Add to that the financial interests we often have in the death of those nearest to us and you have an obvious recipe for disaster.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 25, 2002 7:06 AM