Comatose Daughter Dies After Tube Removal : Medicine: Father who argued for right to die won long court battle. Woman, 22, was injured in 1987 car wreck.

The battle over Christine Busalacchi’s right to die ended with her death Sunday, hospital officials said. The 22-year-old comatose woman’s feeding tube had been removed.

Busalacchi, who had been transferred to Barnes Hospital on Feb. 18, died there Sunday morning, the hospital said in a statement.

The woman’s feeding tube was disconnected after a team of neuroscientists determined that she was in a persistent vegetative state, the hospital said. It didn’t say when the tube was disconnected.

Busalacchi had been comatose since suffering severe head injuries in a 1987 automobile crash. She had been the subject of a long and often bitter court struggle over whether her father, Peter, had the right to allow her feeding tube to be disconnected.

The hospital’s statement said that Busalacchi did not suffer during her last hours. Her father had said for years that she should be allowed to die.

“My feeling is my daughter died a long time ago, and all that’s left is just a machine,” Peter Busalacchi said in December, 1990.

“She doesn’t want to live in a diaper . . . that’s not what she would want. I know that because I know my kid,” Busalacchi had testified in St. Louis County Probate Court.

But the state battled to keep Christine Busalacchi alive until early this year, when newly elected Atty. Gen. Jay Nixon dropped the effort.

On Jan. 26, the Missouri Supreme Court granted Nixon’s motion to dismiss the case.

That left Peter Busalacchi free to decide the fate of his daughter.

Twenty-three days after the Supreme Court granted the dismissal motion, the father authorized Busalacchi’s transfer from the Midtown Habilitation Center, run by the Missouri Department of Mental Health, to private Barnes Hospital.

State regulations barred the removal of Busalacchi’s feeding tube at the Midtown Habilitation Center, but no such rule is in place at Barnes.