Court Lets Victim of Shooting Die

A little more than two months after she was paralyzed by a gunshot fired by her mother, 42-year-old Georgette Smith got her wish Wednesday when doctors obeyed a court order and disconnected the ventilator that was keeping her alive.

Smith’s death clears the way for her mother, Shirley Egan, 68, to be charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors said they would take the case to a grand jury.

“Ms. Smith expired at 5:46 p.m.,” said Lisa Schultz, a spokeswoman for the Lucerne Medical Center in Orlando, pinpointing the time of death at just 46 minutes after the end of a hold placed on the action by a court judge.

“This entire process has been very difficult for everyone involved,” Schultz said. “Our sincere sympathies go out to Georgette Smith’s family.”

Smith’s two adult daughters were at her side when she died.

Egan, a tiny, frail woman who is blind in one eye, allegedly shot the daughter with whom she lived after becoming upset over the prospect of being sent to an assisted living facility. She is jailed on two counts of attempted murder and one count of aggravated assault.

Smith insisted on ending her life despite the entreaties of doctors, counselors and quadriplegics who tried to convince the slender woman that life as a quadriplegic was worth living. “We work with every rehab patient, talking about quality of life, looking at the possibilities available,” Schultz said. “Many people have tried to approach her.”

But Smith, who could speak only with effort, was resolute. “All I can do is wink my eyes, wiggle my nose and wiggle my tongue,” Smith said last week in a deposition. “I can’t move any other part of my body. I can’t breath on my own. I can’t live like this.”

Smith’s daughters, Candace Smith, 22, and Joeleen Hill, 19, supported their mother’s decision.

They also said that Smith had forgiven her mother for shooting her during the domestic dispute.

“She has prepared herself because she knows that she lived a good life and she doesn’t want to finish her life in this situation,” Candace Smith said through sobs last week during a hearing before Orange County Circuit Judge Richard F. Conrad. Smith petitioned the court, asking that the hospital be ordered to grant her request to disconnect the ventilator.

After interviewing Smith in the hospital and finding her “alert, intelligent and able to clearly articulate her thought processes,” Conrad ruled Tuesday in her favor. “Ms. Smith has made a difficult choice, a choice which she has the right to make,” he said.

However, the judge ordered that the ventilator not be turned off before 5 p.m. Wednesday to give prosecutors time to interview Smith further in connection with the criminal case against her mother.

Earlier Tuesday, prosecutors began taking a statement from Smith about the shooting. Her mother was present, taken from jail to the hospital in a wheelchair.

The case of Georgette Smith set no legal precedent. Federal and state courts have affirmed that competent patients have the right to refuse medical treatment.

Nor would it be unique if criminal charges against Egan were upped to murder.

But the case is unusual--and anguishing.

The shooting took place March 8 in the Orlando home that Egan shared with her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend. The elder woman, who had been injured in a car wreck, overheard Smith talking about putting her in an assisted care facility.

Apparently upset over the prospect, Egan picked up a .38-caliber handgun and fired at her daughter. The bullet hit Smith in the neck, severing her spine at the second cervical vertebra.

Egan fired again, police said, at Smith’s boyfriend, Larry Videlock. She missed, and he wrested the gun from her grip.

“She did not intend to shoot her daughter,” said Robert Wesley, Egan’s court-appointed lawyer. “She tried to scare people, tried to shoot over their heads.”

Wesley earlier had said that Egan “doesn’t want her daughter to die. But she doesn’t want her to be in pain either.”

As a quadriplegic, physicians said, Smith would be dependent on a ventilator and a feeding tube for life. The bullet remained embedded in her vertebra.

“If she was not competent, it would be better, because she wouldn’t know what she’s going through,” Candace Smith said last week.

“This case presented an excruciating personal decision,” said University of Miami ethicist Kenneth Goodman. “But the ethics are clear. If she wanted treatment to stop, it should stop.”

While the ethical and legal rights may have been clear, that did not stop other quadriplegics and disabled-rights advocates from publicly calling for Smith to reconsider.

“I have known so many people who at first wanted to die,” said Diane Coleman, an Illinois woman who has a disabling muscular disease and serves as president of Not Dead Yet, a advocacy group.

“But after a year or more they have rebuilt their lives and are glad to be alive. I wish she would wait.”

Dr. Naomi Kleitman, education director for the Miami Project, which conducts research on spinal cord injuries, said: “We have a lot of technology now that helps people. . . . Most people get some function back. And other treatments are coming.”

Although prosecutors have said they think they can win a first-degree murder case against Egan, others expressed doubts. Andrew Kayton, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said that Smith’s decision led to her death, not the gunshot.

In his opinion Tuesday, Conrad made a comparison between Smith’s right to die and the state’s duty to prevent suicide. “Ms. Smith did not cause her injury,” Conrad wrote. “Ms. Smith is not taking any independent affirmative action to end her life. Instead, she wishes to discontinue artificial life-prolonging medical treatment. There is a distinction between choosing death and choosing not to prolong life.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.