News Herald, Ohio
June 3 2011
WITH SLIDESHOW: Jack Kevorkian dead at 83
Published: Friday, June 03, 2011
By Carol Hopkins Journal Register News Service
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, an advocate of assisted suicide, has died at age
83, his lawyer says. He died at a Detroit-area hospital, according to
Mayer Morganroth.
Jack Kevorkian, the world’s most famous advocate of assisted suicide –
nicknamed Dr. Death – died Friday, June 3, his attorney said. He was
83.
A pathologist by profession, Kevorkian took a public stand about
euthanasia in the 1980s.
Beginning in 1990, Kevorkian assisted in a Portland, Ore. woman’s
suicide in Groveland Township, and over the next decade took part in
130 suicides.
After being convicted in 1999 of second-degree murder of Thomas Youk,
a man who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, Kevorkian served more than eight
years in prison.
Mayer Morganroth, Kevorkian’s long-time friend and attorney, said
Kevorkian helped people understand their end-of-life rights.
Morganroth noted that now Washington, Oregon and Montana allow
assisted suicide, and that many countries around the world either
allow or are considering approving it.
`Ironically, his main achievement may have been to give great impetus
to the hospice movement, and also to stimulate doctors to be much more
aggressive about pain management issues,’ said Jack Lessenberry, a
reporter who covered Kevorkian for the New York Times and Vanity Fair.
Ruth Holmes, a longtime friend and jury consultant during his trials,
recalled what one excused juror said about Kevorkian, “The only thing
this man is guilty of is being ahead of his time.’ Whether you are for
or against Jack, he has raised awareness of the issues of end of life
and the right to have a choice.’
Roots in Pontiac
Jack Kevorkian has always been deeply connected to Oakland County.
Born Murad Kevorkian in Pontiac on May 26, 1928, he was the second of
three children born to Armenian immigrants who had escaped their
native country’s post-World War I massacres.
His father at first worked in a foundry but eventually opened his own
excavating company. Murad – the couple’s only son – was nicknamed
`Jack’ by teachers and friends.
An inquisitive child and avid reader, Kevorkian excelled in school.
Reports indicate because he was considered a bookworm, he had
difficulty making friends. He graduated from Pontiac High School in
1945 at age 17.
Kevorkian entered the University of Michigan to study engineering but
became bored and switched his focus to medicine.
His specialty was pathology – the study of corpses to determine the
cause of death.
It was here at the university hospital that he became interested in
death and dying and regularly visited terminally ill patients to
attempt to photograph their eyes at the moment of death.
He graduated with a medical degree in 1952. In 1953, he served as an
U.S. Army medical officer in Korea.
During his residencies after his military service, he earned the
nickname “Dr. Death’ for his habit of rushing between dying patients
taking photos of changes that occurred in their eyes.
Kevorkian said he found the research interesting but was also
attracted to it because it was `taboo.’
Kevorkian read of how Armenians had once performed experiments on men
condemned to death. This prompted Kevorkian to visit prisons and write
articles about the benefits of testing prisoners, and even harvesting
death-row inmates’ organs.
It made people uneasy because doctors would have had to keep the
prisoners alive until they were eviscerated – and then put to death.
He later learned of a Russian medical team working on transfusing
blood from corpses into living people and he sought the help of a
medical technologist named Neal Nicol to assist him. Kevorkian thought
the military might find the research useful. To the contrary, the
radical idea upset colleagues who considered him a controversial
figure.
Kevorkian moved from hospital to hospital. During this time he wrote
professional articles about death.
A former colleague, John Marra, said Kevorkian `almost bordered on
genius. He spoke several languages, played three or four musical
instruments and won some prizes for his paintings.’
He broke off a relationship with a fiancee by 1970.
He also quit his pathology career, traveled to California, and
invested his life savings in a movie based on Handel’s “Messiah.” The
movie failed.
In 1982, he was alone, jobless, sometimes living in his car.
Then in 1986 he learned how doctors in the Netherlands were assisting
people who wished to die by using lethal injections.
Kevorkian became an advocate of euthanasia and created a suicide
machine he called the `Thanatron,’ which is the Greek for `instrument
of death.’
The device, made with scraps Kevorkian bought at garage sales,
consisted of three bottles – saline solution, a painkiller and a fatal
amount of poison potassium chloride. The device allowed patients to
administer the dosages themselves.
Kevorkian, who lived in Royal Oak, showed up at The Oakland Press in
October, 1989 with the famous device.
On that cold autumn day when he shook a reporter’s hand in the office
lobby, he said, `I’m sorry my hands are so cold. They kind of feel
like a corpse, don’t they?’
That day he described the invention’s effect on a patient as `like
having a heart attack in your sleep.’
Kevorkian said his invention would only be used by terminally ill
patients who could decide themselves to activate the device.
`If a patient is ill and crippled and suffering, I am here to help him
no matter what I personally think,’ he said.
At the time Gerald Poisson, Oakland County Chief Assistant Prosecutor
at the time said the machine was not illegal.
But as time passed and more suicides took place, that position would change.
The famous first assisted-suicide case
In 1990 Kevorkian assisted in the suicide of Janet Adkins, a
Alzheimer’s patient from Portland, Ore.
Kevorkian drove her in his van and drove her to a Groveland Oak County
Park campsite.
At first law enforcement authorities and prosecutors were unsure what
to do about the situation since conflicting Michigan rulings made it
unclear whether it was a crime to assist someone with a suicide.
`Let them try, there is no law against what I did,’ said Kevorkian.
With his original machine gone, Kevorkian switched to a new device
which delivered carbon monoxide through a mask.
In November 1991 Michigan’s Board of Medicine revoked Kevorkian’s
license to practice medicine.
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