Spouse Lays Actions to Trauma of Suicide : Investigation: He left soon after his wife’s machine-aided death to avoid police questions. ‘I had already had as much as I could handle,’ he says.

Ronald Adkins, the husband of the Portland, Ore., woman who committed suicide in Michigan last week with the assistance of a controversial doctor, said Thursday that he tried to leave the area and avoid state police questioning on the afternoon of the death because he had just been through an emotionally wrenching experience.

Adkins’ attempt to quickly leave Michigan has caused some law enforcement officials to question his actions. A criminal investigation into the suicide is under way.

A Michigan State Police detective who temporarily halted Ronald Adkins’ departure at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport--by ordering his airplane not to leave the gate--said that he was puzzled by Adkins’ reluctance to stay in the area in order to submit to questioning by the police.

Adkins said in an interview Thursday that he did later attempt to contact the police after he left the state, but said law enforcement officials failed to return his call.

“I felt it was a very hectic and traumatic day, and I had already had as much as I could handle,” Adkins said. “You can imagine what kind of trauma that day held for me,” he added.

On Monday, June 4, Adkins’ wife, Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old victim of Alzheimer’s disease, committed suicide in the back of a rusting 1968 Volkswagen van with the assistance of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak, Mich., who has long been an advocate of doctor-assisted suicide.

Kevorkian connected Janet Adkins to his home-built “suicide machine,” which then intravenously fed death-inducing drugs into her system after she pushed a button on the device.

The case has since become a nationwide sensation, sparking an emotionally charged debate over the right-to-die issue. Ronald Adkins, a Portland investment broker, has given a wide range of interviews and has appeared on several television talk shows in support of his wife’s decision to end her life.

On the day of the suicide, state police said that Adkins at first sought to evade their attempts to identify him as he stood waiting to board his commercial flight at Detroit’s airport and then rejected a request that he accompany an officer to a phone to talk to investigators handling the suicide case.

He then boarded his plane. The suspicious officer then called in for more information about the case, which was still unfolding. The officer then forced Adkins to come off his plane and acknowledge his identity and knowledge of the incident. Adkins was then allowed to depart.

Adkins said Thursday that his frantic and traumatic schedule that day were responsible for the way he responded to the police inquiry.

“It was all planned . . . and the arrangements were made that way” for him to leave as soon as his wife was dead, Adkins said.

Adkins had stayed behind at a motel with a close family friend while his wife went to a rural park to meet Kevorkian and end her life. And, as soon as Kevorkian called to tell him that his wife was dead, he left his motel. “After Dr. Kevorkian called me, I immediately went from (the motel) to the funeral parlor,” where Adkins made arrangements for his wife’s body to be cremated after an autopsy by the Oakland County, Mich., medical examiner. “Then I had to run from there to the airport and turn my (rental) car in, and I was running all the time.”