Notes: Husband wanted to end `nightmare'

[JayS]

April 30, 2004, 12:21AM
Notes: Husband wanted to end `nightmare'
By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2540434


GRAPEVINE -- Nursing home workers didn't notice anything unusual when they helped 84-year-old Neville Booker out of his car with his oxygen tank and guided him up a ramp and through the automatic doors to visit his 81-year-old wife.

But hiding in his pocket was a small handgun, and in his wallet was a neatly folded, handwritten note detailing his anguish over his battle with leukemia and his wife's paralysis after a stroke.

An hour after Booker made his way into his wife's room at CLC Woodridge Nursing Home and closed the door Wednesday, workers were stunned to find the couple's bodies, each with a gunshot wound to the head.

Booker shot his wife, Jessie, as she sat in her wheelchair. He then sat beside her in a chair and shot himself, Grapevine police Sgt. Bob Murphy said.

Besides the suicide note found in his wallet, Booker left a note at his son's house in Grapevine, northeast of Fort Worth, where he had been staying, Murphy said. In both notes, Booker said he wanted to end the "dual nightmare" he and his wife were living, before his health completely deteriorated, Murphy said.



*SNIP*

[pop goes the weasel]

1. compassionate conservatism strikes again

Why is there always money to warehouse people in substandard over-priced nursing homes, but not enough money to provide rehabilitation and counseling? Sure, these two people were at the end of their lives anyways, but the last months of the lives of even very old or very ill people can be months of comfort and peace. This couple doesn't seem to have gotten that. And obviously that nursing "home" was incompetently run for there to have been two gun shots and no one noticed.