[BobbyB]

KY3 News rewind to 1996: Assisted suicide debate hits the Ozarks
by KY3 News

Velma Howard committed suicide in a motel room in Joplin in 1995 while her husband and son were present. (KY3 NEWS archive)

YouNewsTV™Story Published: Jan 12, 2008 at 4:25 AM CST

Story Updated: Jan 11, 2008 at 4:36 PM CST
By Gene Hartley
Video This is an exclusive weekend feature of KY3.com. We search the KY3 News archives to find stories that you may want to "rewind" and watch again.
----

The assisted suicide controversy hit the Ozarks in 1995 and 1996 after the death of a woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Velma Howard, 76, drank a mix of sleeping medicine and alcohol at a motel in Joplin. She then pulled a plastic bag over her head to end her life. Her husband and one son were accused of helping Howard kill herself.

This week’s KY3 News Rewind segment is a report by Leanne Kim, who left here to take a job in San Diego. She talked to relatives of Nancy Cruzan about the Howard case. Cruzan is the woman from Carthage who became the focus of a battle over “the right to die” in the late 1980s.

The Howard case was described as one of the first tests of a ban on helping people commit suicide. One article said, “At the time nobody in America had been convicted of assisted suicide."

Velma Howard was described in the same article (assistedsuicide.org) this way, “Velma Howard, aged 76, knew her life was coming to an end. Lou Gehrig's Disease was taking away the use of her limbs one by one. Eventually it would affect her throat and she would be in danger of choking on her own saliva. This elderly, respectable, Middle American decided on rational suicide.”

This is what KY3 reported a year later on charges against Howard’s husband and son being dropped, “The Newton County prosecutor says he will not re-file charges against a man who helped his terminally ill wife commit suicide at a Joplin motel room in December 1995. 77-year-old Bernard J. Howard and his son were accused of helping place a plastic bag over 76-year-old Velma Howard's face and suffocating her. Mrs. Howard suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease. The decision came yesterday as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on upholding bans on doctor-assisted suicides.”
----

For more information on the case:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A960958260

http://www.assistedsuicide.org/typical_example.html

http://www.ky3.com/news/local/13716867.html