Kansas City Star
June 4 2011
Kevorkian a lightning rod for debate, controversy
By JOE SWICKARD, PATRICIA ANSTETT AND L.L. BRASIER
Detroit Free Press
Jack Kevorkian, after years of combative advocacy for assisted
suicide, slipped quietly from life early Friday morning. Known as Dr.
Death even before launching his fierce fights against the medical and
legal establishments, Kevorkian, 83, died at Beaumont Hospital in
Royal Oak, Mich., where he had been hospitalized with kidney problems
and pneumonia.
“It was peaceful. He didn’t feel a thing,” said his attorney Mayer Morganroth.
Admired as a compassionate crusader or abhorred as a murderous crank,
Kevorkian is widely credited with changing how states deal with
assisted suicide and stimulating much-needed discussion about
improving end-of-life care in the U.S.
Kevorkian admitted being present at about 130 suicides, and his
hectoring defiance of established laws and protocols forced
re-examination of personal freedoms in medical treatments and
end-of-life decisions.
“He had an impact, but not deliberately,” said Dr. Maria Silveira, a
University of Michigan end-of-life specialist.
“He was such a lighting rod that there was a huge reaction to what he
was doing,” Silveira said. “Many people in medicine were quite alarmed
at the notion that we could be asked to help assist our patients in
death and dying. In response to that, more of us began to realize we
had a greater responsibility to recognize our patients’ suffering and
to find ways to address it, short of what Jack Kevorkian was doing.”
Kevorkian “was a historic man,” said attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who
represented him in numerous legal fights. “It’s a rare human being who
can single-handedly take on an entire society by the scruff of its
neck and force it to focus on the suffering of other human beings.”
Many people who went to Kevorkian called him the best doctor they had
ever seen.
“I know my mom and myself were eternally grateful. … He wasn’t a
kook or anything. He was a man with an idea whose time had come,” said
Alan O’Keefe, 52, of Lincoln Township, Mich. Kevorkian helped his
father, Donald O’Keefe, 73, a retired engineer with bone cancer, to
die in 1993.
Since his first acknowledged assisted suicide in 1990, authorities had
tried to rein in Kevorkian as the toll soared. He was charged four
times with murder only to have three juries acquit him and one case
collapse in mistrial.
That streak of courtroom triumphs ended with the 1998 death of Thomas
Youk, 52, of Waterford, Mich., who had Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In a self-inflicted triple injury, Kevorkian videotaped himself
injecting Youk, had it broadcast on “60 Minutes,” and then acted as
his own lawyer in the ensuing Oakland County murder trial.
Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to
10 to 25 years in prison in 1999 . He was released in 2007 and
discharged from parole in 2009.
His post-prison career included a 2008 congressional bid and a cable
TV bio pic starring Al Pacino.
In his failed political career, Kevorkian, as usual, cast himself as
the truth-teller in a world of hypocrisy: “We need some honesty and
sincerity instead of corrupt government in Washington.”
“You Don’t Know Jack,” the HBO film, earned Pacino an Emmy, Golden
Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. Kevorkian cut a vivid image at
premiers, sometimes wearing his iconic blue thrift store sweater with
a tuxedo. He almost glowed at receptions as women circled him and
powerful men elbowed their way through the adoring crush to shake his
hand.
Later, when friend Neal Nicol gave him a picture of Pacino from the
film, Kevorkian joked: “Where did they get that picture of me?”
Despite his public persona, Kevorkian will not be openly memorialized,
Morganroth said.
“If Jack could look down on us – and who knows – he wouldn’t want
that,” Morganroth said.
Kevorkian’s death, naturally and in a hospital, was not a rejection of
his own beliefs, Morganroth said.
“There was no reason for him to end his own life,” he said. “It wasn’t
terminal until the end with the clot. He followed his own wishes and
died the way he wanted to.”
The son of Armenian immigrants, Kevorkian was born in 1928 and raised
in Pontiac, Mich., during the Depression and World War II. The son of
an excavation contractor, Kevorkian graduated from the University of
Michigan School of Medicine in 1952, but his career soon took an
idiosyncratic trajectory.
A book about the Greco-Egyptian Ptolemies who ruled Egypt for about
300 years just before the start of the Common Era shaped Kevorkian’s
life for the next half-century. As he’d recall in interviews and court
testimony, the book described a society in which criminals repaid
their crimes by undergoing medical and scientific experimentation.
Kevorkian was soon advocating use of convicts and condemned prisoners
for experiments and research. He and U-M parted ways, and he moved his
residency to Pontiac General Hospital, but interrupted it for a year
of independent study in Europe.
He returned to the U.S. and completed his residency. He was first
called Dr. Death by nurses for his fascination with the transition
from life. Volunteering for night shifts, he photographed the eyes of
deceased patients as close to the instant of death as possible.
He became a pathologist and worked at several Detroit-area hospitals.
His interest expanded into the use of blood from cadavers, including
direct corpse-to-patient transfusions. He envisioned tremendous
battlefield benefits if wounded soldiers were saved through their
fallen comrades’ blood.
Turned down for a research grant – an act he would later call an
example of establishment corruption – he moved to the West Coast where
he worked for several Southern California hospitals. Stretching
frugality to eccentricity, he sometimes lived in his 1968 Volkswagen
van.
His last employment ended in 1982 when he left a Long Beach, Calif.,
hospital to devote himself to research and authoring articles such as
“Marketing of Human Organs and Tissue is Justified and Necessary” and
“The Last Fearsome Taboo,” a work outlining his theories of suicide
clinics and experimenting on patients.
Returning to Michigan, he lived a skinflint’s life in a barely
furnished apartment above a store in downtown Royal Oak. He lived on
cheese sandwiches and shopped for clothes at the Salvation Army.
Kevorkian knew he was often seen as an odd bird: “I’ve never really fit in.”
Ultimately for Kevorkian, thought and words demanded deeds.
In 1987, he tried placing newspaper ads offering “Special Death
Counseling.” Instead, he got references in short stories in the
Detroit Free Press and magazines like Newsweek about a strange
pathologist.
One of those reading about Kevorkian – who had cobbled a suicide
machine out of $30 worth of spare parts – was Janet Adkins, a former
teacher in Portland, Ore. Adkins, who at 54 had an early diagnosis of
Alzheimer’s disease, feared the conditions’ inevitable mind-stealing
progression and flew to Detroit.
The jury-rigged device delivered the flow of saline, sedatives and
finally the heart-stopping potassium chloride, and Adkins died June 4,
1990, inside Kevorkian’s rusty VW van.
Her death – a murder charge was dismissed before trial – launched
Kevorkian into the national eye and set his course.
Using drugs and later carbon monoxide, Kevorkian, backed with a
coterie of supporters, attended more deaths, sometimes dropping the
bodies off at hospitals, other times having them collected at the
suburban Oakland County home of his associate Nicol.
Gaunt, theatrical and hyperbolic, Kevorkian appeared to demand
martyrdom, staging increasingly outlandish provocations from appearing
in court as Thomas Jefferson in a tri-cornered hat, knee britches and
powdered wig to offering for transplant a client’s crudely harvested
kidneys.
Those who opposed him were denounced as superstitious know-nothings,
Dark Age hypocrites and philosophical cowards.
Medical experts challenged his methods.
“Kevorkian presented a false choice,” said Dr. Michael Paletta , chief
medical officer for Hospice of Michigan. “Either have your pain and
suffering or have a physician end your life.”
Legal authorities also were taking notice and action against Kevorkian.
By then, he had teamed with attorney Fieger, who turned the trials
into slashing attacks on then-Oakland County Prosecutor Richard
Thompson. In the ensuing cases, Thompson, Oakland County Medical
Examiner L.J. Dragovic and the medical establishment were cast as
cruel, hidebound fanatics condemning the sufferers to end their lives
in agony and helpless humiliation.
“I want to make euthanasia a positive thing” for those too weary and
beaten by illness, Kevorkian said.
Kevorkian and Fieger loudly proclaimed that they stood for personal
freedom to choose a gentle, dignified release. Along the way, they
slapped a red clown’s nose on a blow-up of Thompson and cast the
Yugoslavian-born Dragovic as bowtie-wearing incarnation of Dracula.
They won acquittals in three murder trials and a mistrial in another.
It was a fractious courtroom partnership, though, with an agitated
Kevorkian often trying to direct the case as Fieger shouted, “Shut
up!”
Kevorkian’s authority-baiting antics got him on David Letterman’s Top
10 lists, but they antagonized potential allies.
Derek Humphry of the Hemlock Society, which advocates for the right to
suicide, said Kevorkian was “too obsessed, too fanatical, in his
interest in death and suicide to offer direction for the nation.”
Nevertheless, he undeniably forced the debate into the limelight.
In 1994, Oregon voters approved a measure making physician-assisted
suicide a legal medical option for terminally ill residents. It was
delayed through a series of court challenges and in 1997, Oregonians
again voted in favor of it.
As his fame grew, Kevorkian, still wearing a $1.50 thrift shop
cardigan, exhibited his gruesome paintings of leering skulls, agonized
patients or dismembered bodies. He also performed his own musical
compositions as he championed the notion of absolute personal freedom
in life decisions.
Then-Gov. John Engler and Michigan state legislators tried to curtail
or outlaw his practice, which only fed Kevorkian’s loud outrage and
demands for carefully administered release for terminal or agonized
patients.
But growing examination of Kevorkian’s works showed he often ignored
his own professed standards.
Franz-Johann Long, a 53-year-old Pennsylvania man who died in late
1997, told Kevorkian that he had terminal bladder cancer. But
relatives said he had a history of mental illness – at times he
claimed to be a secret agent – and an autopsy found only a
“superficially involved” tumor.
Autopsies of at least five other people who died with Kevorkian in
Oakland County found no sign of diseases, and only 17 of 69 closely
examined cases had terminal illnesses or conditions such as multiple
sclerosis or cancer.
In November 1998, 1 1/2 months after a state law banning
doctor-assisted suicide took effect, CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired a tape of
Kevorkian fatally injecting Youk, who had amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis . He then dared officials to do something about it.
“Either they go or I go,” Kevorkian told CBS interviewer Mike Wallace.
“If I’m acquitted, they go because they know they’ll never convict me.
If I am convicted, I will starve to death in prison. The issue has got
to be raised to a level where it is finally decided.”
Waterford Police Lt. John Dean was taken by Kevorkian’s demeanor on
the tape: “He was a very charming man, but then, so was Ted Bundy.”
The murder charge was brought by David Gorcyca, who was elected
Oakland County prosecutor on a pledge not to pursue Kevorkian using
homicide charges based on common law.
“I was elected and dismissed 17 counts against him,” Gorcyca said.
He said he ignored Kevorkian for 18 months, depriving him of an antagonist.
“I ignored him until he went on ’60 Minutes'” with the taped death of
Youk in 1998, Gorcyca said. “He not only dared me to prosecute him, he
begged me. He wanted to be on the national and international stage.”
Kevorkian chose to act as his own lawyer.
Trial prosecutor John Skrzynski, who had lost one murder case against
Kevorkian, said the doctor’s motive didn’t matter because it “is not
an element of murder. The facts are pretty cut-and-dried in this case.
He spelled out all the elements himself.”
Outside court, Kevorkian shouted: “The question is, do any of you
think I’m a criminal?”
But inside court on April 13, 1999, an Oakland County jury convicted
him of second-degree murder and he was ordered to serve a 10- to
25-year sentence.
Former Oakland County Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper, currently the
county prosecutor, oversaw the trial.
At his sentencing, Cooper had strong words for the tiny man in the
orange jumpsuit.
“You invited yourself to the wrong forum,” she said in a lecture that
was broadcast worldwide. “When you purposely inject another human
being with what you know to be a lethal dosage of poison, that sir, is
murder and the jury found so.
“Then you had the audacity to go on national television, show the
world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you. Well, sir,
consider yourself stopped.”
Inside the prison walls, his fame endured. He was given the Gleitsman
Foundation’s Citizen Activist Award in 2000.
Attending and accepting him was his lawyer Morganroth, who read a
statement from the imprisoned pathologist saying his acts had been
wrongly criminalized.
Attempts to overturn his convictions were rejected, as were his
efforts to win an early release. His health started faltering in
prison, and he was paroled in 2007.
As a parolee, he faced the usual restrictions and constraints – seeing
a parole officer, getting drug and alcohol testing and shunning
felons, weapons and anything that constitutes criminal behavior.
There were special conditions, too. He couldn’t provide care for
anyone older than 62 or who was disabled. He was barred from being
present at any suicide or euthanasia, and he could not counsel people
on how to commit suicide.
Once free, Kevorkian’s health continued to fail.
Kevorkian’s assistant Nicol said he and Kevorkian contracted hepatitis
C from experiments they did together in the 1960s at the former
Pontiac General Hospital, where they both worked – Kevorkian as a
pathologist and Nicol as a medical assistant. Kevorkian was
hospitalized twice in May because of kidney problems and a fall.
Additionally, he suffered from an array of ailments including liver
and heart disorders. He underwent hernia surgery in February 2005.
Doctors hoped they could strengthen the frail Kevorkian so he could
undergo radiation treatments for the cancer, but “his strength never
got to that point.” Indeed, Kevorkian’s cancer appeared treatable. He
had only two tumors on his liver, one benign and the other small,
Morganroth said.
Kevorkian spent his 83rd birthday on May 26 in the hospital, where
Nicol; Ava Janus, Kevorkian’s niece; longtime Royal Oak friend Brian
Russell; and Morganroth visited him.
Even at the end, Kevorkian was seeking answers, Morganroth said. He
didn’t deny the afterlife as much as challenge the notion of an
eternal soul, Morganroth said.
“Jack wasn’t an atheist. He was an agnostic,” Morganroth said. “He
wasn’t sure – but now he knows.”
(Staff writers Cecil Angel, Megha Satyanarayana, Mike Brookbank, John
Wisely, Tammy Stables Battaglia, Matt Helms, Kathleen Gray and Chris
Christoff contributed to this report)
From: Baghdasarian