DEL.ICIO.USWoman who killed sick sons wants assisted suicide legalized
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Carol Carr said she is too old and tired to be dragged into the draining, emotional debate concerning assisted suicide.
The Griffin woman was at the vortex of the issue in 2002 after killing her two gravely ill sons. But asked whether a law should allow assisted suicide, Carr went on a rant about nursing home profits and the inability of dying people’s families to control the end of life.
MARLENE KARAS
Carol Carr of Griffin, who served two years in jail for shooting her two gravely ill sons, blames nursing homes for the fact that doctors aren’t allowed to end patients’ lives.
Jean Shifrin/2002 AJC file
James Scott, whose mother killed his brothers, also has the hereditary Huntington’s disease.
“They won’t let an animal suffer; they’re put to sleep,” Carr said Friday. “But there’s no money in keeping animals [alive]. It’s all about money. Money. Money.”
Doctors should be allowed to end the life of terminally ill people if that is their wish, she said.
Carr’s case came to mind after the arrests last week of two metro area people charged with assisting in the suicide of a Cumming man. The two suspects, and two others arrested in Baltimore, are affiliated with the Cobb County-based Final Exit Network, one of the nation’s most prominent assisted-suicide groups.
But what made Carr’s case so wrenching was there was no dispassionate third party assisting in her sons’ deaths. Their murders were widely viewed as mercy killings, committed by a devastated mother who claimed one son was begging with his eyes for her to kill him
In June 2002 Carr went into a Griffin nursing home with a .25-caliber semiautomatic and put a bullet behind the ear of Randy Scott, 42, and then shot his younger brother, Andy Scott, 41. The two were bed-ridden and in advanced stages of Huntington’s disease, a hereditary, degenerative nerve disorder that progressively robs those afflicted of muscle control.
She then sat down and waited for police. The sobbing mother asked the responding officers to kill her.
Carr was charged with two counts of murder, but she pleaded guilty to assisting in the commission of suicide and was sentenced to five years in prison. She was released after serving only two. At the time, parole board member Mike Light said she had suffered enough: “Carol Carr has punished herself more than the prison system will ever be able to punish her.”
Another son, James Scott, 44, was vocal in his support of his mother at the time and also went to the media to publicize Huntington’s disease. He said he was diagnosed with it in the 1990s.
As part of her parole, Carr was ordered to live apart from James. And if James was to get seriously ill, she could not be listed as his primary caregiver. He now lives in a small home in Griffin about seven miles from his mother.
Carr’s sons are the second generation to suffer the family curse. Their father, Hoyt Scott, died of Huntington’s in a nursing home in 1995.
“My husband laid in there for 13 years. Thirteen years!” Carr said. “There’s no reason for something like that to happen — laying in a body that doesn’t work, where you can’t talk to tell anyone that you hurt. They let you lay there with a feeding tube and you lay there in your own pee and stool.”
At the time of the killings, she claimed Randy had been catheterized because of frequent bed-wetting and was crying and trying to pull out the device.
“I really blame it on the nursing homes. They have a stranglehold. They want them to lay there and take their money.”
Many disability advocates and groups such as Not Dead Yet, which oppose assisted suicide, say that the practice devalues human life and will lead to the killing of unwanted and defenseless people. Not Dead Yet claims assisted suicide is the “ultimate form of discrimination.”
Even families are split when it comes to the practice, which is illegal in Georgia.
The relatives of John Celmer, the Cumming man whose death sparked the investigation of the Final Exit Network, took opposing views. His wife, Susan, helped authorities investigate his death after finding evidence in his townhouse of his correspondence with the suspects.
But his mother, Betty, said the suspects should not face charges if they were carrying out his wishes.
Carr, who lives in Hampton, not far from the Atlanta Motor Speedway, said she would be interested in some legislation but would not be a soldier in the fight.
“I wish I could do something about this. But I’m 70 years old and I’m tired. I’m tired.”
On Friday, James Scott said he, too, was wounded by the events of seven years ago. He said members of his father’s family have split with him because he went public with the fact that Huntington’s disease is hereditary.
James also believes assisted suicide should be legal.
“There should be some easier way than what we went through,” he said. His mother “went through a lot. We all went through a lot.
“There should be a doctor to do it with some kind of medication.”
He said he tried to get involved with efforts to legalize assisted suicide but it became too emotionally grueling.
James Scott is able to walk and move about, but he has updated his living will.
He gets angry talking about nursing homes. He said his brothers were “nursing homes’ perfect patients: They couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk. They made them money. “I definitely don’t ever want to go in one.”
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