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Terri Schiavo dies 13 days after tube removal
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pinellas Park, Fla. — Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman whose 15 years connected to a feeding tube sparked an epic legal battle that went all the way to the White House and Congress, died Thursday, 13 days after the tube was removed. She was 41.
Schiavo died at the Pinellas Park hospice where she lay for years while her husband and her parents fought over her fate in the nation’s longest, most bitter right-to-die dispute.
Her death was confirmed to The Associated Press by Michael Schiavo’s attorney, George Felos, and announced to reporters outside her hospice by a family adviser.
Brother Paul O’Donnell, an adviser to Schiavo’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, said the parents and their two other children ”were denied access at the moment of her death. They’ve been requesting, as you know, for the last hour to try to be in there and they were denied access by Michael Schiavo. They are in there now, praying at her bedside.”
Schiavo suffered severe brain damage in 1990 after her heart stopped because of a chemical imbalance that was believed to have been brought on an eating disorder. Court-appointed doctors ruled she was in a persistent vegetative state, with no real consciousness or chance of recovery.
The feeding tube was removed with a judge’s approval March 18 after Michael Schiavo argued that his wife told him long ago she would not want to be kept alive artificially. His in-laws disputed that, and argued that she could get better with treatment.
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