Kevorkian Misses Hearing on Revoking California License

Dr. Jack Kevorkian moved closer to having his California medical license permanently revoked Tuesday when he failed to appear at a hearing before an administrative law judge in connection with the assisted suicides of two Southern California residents.

By not attending or sending a lawyer to represent him, Kevorkian defaulted on keeping his license, which state officials suspended in April, 1993. Judge Joyce Wharton forwarded the matter to the Medical Board of California, which is expected to revoke the license.

“The effect of this litigation is to reduce Jack Kevorkian to Mr. Kevorkian,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Thomas Lazar, who represented the state at Tuesday’s hearing. “He’s essentially been kicked out of the world of medicine. In any future litigation, he won’t be able to say, ‘This was my patient.’ He’s not licensed to practice medicine anywhere in the world.”

Early last year, Dixon Arnett, executive director of the medical board, announced his intention to have the license revoked, expressing concern that Kevorkian had begun to recruit Californians who might desire his help in committing suicide.

Arnett asked the judge to begin the proceedings after Kevorkian helped the two Southern Californians die.

Kevorkian, 65, dubbed “Dr. Death” for having assisted in 20 suicides, obtained a California medical license in 1957 and worked from 1979 to 1982 at two hospitals in Long Beach. He lives in Troy, Mich., near where each of the suicides has taken place.

Kevorkian could not be reached for comment Tuesday, and his Michigan-based attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, declined to comment. But last year, when California suspended Kevorkian’s license, Fieger said the retired pathologist had no intention of filing an appeal.

State officials presented evidence Tuesday showing that Kevorkian had assisted in the suicides of a Costa Mesa man--whose best friend argued that he was merely depressed over the death of his mother and not seriously ill--and a San Diego woman suffering from terminal cancer.

Jonathon Grenz got cancer in 1992, causing doctors to remove his voice box and tongue. At the time of his death early last year at age 44, Grenz was “depressed from his surgery, overwhelmed with grief over the loss of his mother and was never given the opportunity to grieve over his losses,” according to the court testimony of Newport Beach real estate agent Linda Healy, who had worked with Grenz at an Orange County real estate firm.

Marty Ruwart, 40, of San Diego, whose duodenal cancer had invaded her small intestine and ovaries with numerous tumors, died in a Waterford, Mich., home in 1993 with Kevorkian by her side. It was Ruwart’s death that prompted the Michigan Legislature to pass a law banning assisted suicide.