A Life That Matters
Page 23
12 2. During his research on our behalf, Sheehan was informed by the nursing home that Michael had refused medication for Terri’s UTI. (back to text)
13 3. It’s possible that pressure was put on them not to join the case, but that’s only conjecture. (back to text)
14 4. In a hearing before Judge Greer over the question of having Terri’s feeding tube removed, Sheehan testified that he had indeed never explained to us what the term meant and admitted he had made an error. (back to text)
15 5. If he’d divorced Terri, he would have lost access to her estate and guardianship. (back to text)
16 1. We asked Judge Greer to see Terri for himself, but he refused. As far as we know, he never visited her during the five years of court hearings. (back to text)
17 2. This disturbed many of the attorneys who studied the case, who felt one of the appeals courts should have overturned Greer’s decision, since he was acting as Terri’s guardian. That Terri was never afforded a guardian who wasn’t also the judge in her case, and that she was never afforded her own attorney, was in direct violation of Florida statute law. (back to text)
18 3. Quinlan’s case became a national story. (back to text)
19 4. In an appearance on Larry King Live, Michael used Felos’s hypothetical questions to attack Bob. “Well, if you listened to Mr. Schindler in the testimony back in the trial, he would cut off his daughter’s arms and legs and still keep her alive, and I’m not going to let any parent that would do that to their child ever take care of her.” The public thought we were fanatical nuts who’d go to ridiculous extremes to save Terri’s life. Say what you will about Felos, he was certainly a master manipulator. (back to text)
20 5. Terri’s other good friend Diane Meyer also testified—about the fight she had with Michael in Pennsylvania. (back to text)
21 6. Jackie and her husband divorced soon after Terri collapsed. (back to text)
22 7. In 1996. Jackie had moved from Florida and came back to see Terri. (back to text)
23 8. In Judge Greer’s ruling, he cited every one of the witnesses’ testimony except Jackie’s. None of us know why. (back to text)
24 9. We could have provided uncles, aunts, cousins, and additional friends of Terri’s who were lined up to testify that Terri made no such comments, but Pam chose not to call them. (back to text)
25 10. To get Brian’ s testimony on record, Felos later questioned Brian in front of the court recorder when Judge Greer was absent. (back to text)
26 11. Life is never a burden, regardless of a person’s disability. (back to text)
27 12. He remains our bishop today. (back to text)
28 1. We had been unable to locate an appeals lawyer in so short a time. (back to text)
29 2. I believe that God sends special people when you are in most need. For the next five years, Monsignor Malanowski had a tremendous influence on our lives. His strength and wisdom helped us maintain our sanity. (back to text)
30 3. Felos resigned his position in the same time frame that Terri was transferred, but we have no doubt he still had influence. (back to text)
31 4. Sargent resigned from the hospice a few years later, though I’m not sure it had anything to do with the fight or with Terri. (back to text)
32 1. Suzanne had been divorced from her first husband for several years. (back to text)
33 1. We had to go in front of Judge Greer to rescind the ban, one of his few rulings in our favor. Bobby and Suzanne were allowed back into the hospice six months later, in October. (back to text)
34 2. About twenty-five miles east of St. Petersburg. (back to text)
35 3. Under Felos’s questioning, Cindi agreed that Michael might not have been stalking her at the hospital where she worked—he had gotten a job at the same hospital—but that he would follow her in his car when she drove, and that throughout 1993, there were often twelve to fifteen phone calls a day that nobody answered when she picked up She was sure they were from Michael. On redirect, she said that when she found out that Michael had gotten a job at the hospital and was looking for her, she was shocked (back to text)
36 and scared. (back to text)
37 4. Padre Pio wasn’t a saint then. He has since been canonized. (back to text)
38 1. Felos immediately filed suit to have it overturned. He was denied. (back to text)
39 2. Meanwhile, on April 26, Pat filed a complaint in civil court accusing Michael of fraud and perjury. On May 6, she amended the complaint to include breach of fiduciary duty and conspiracy, among other charges. On June 14, Felos gave notice that Michael would not be available for his scheduled deposition. On two separate occasions, subpoena servers could not locate Michael. His and his fiancée’s whereabouts were unknown. The deposition was rescheduled four or five times. Michael didn’t appear for any of them. No penalty was leveled against him. Eventually, the civil suit was thrown out. (back to text)
40 3. In August 2001, for example, Pat filed a “motion of bias” requesting Greer to remove himself from the case because his eyesight was so bad he could not see Terri’s reactions in the videotape. Greer turned down the motion. (back to text)
41 4. He had also ruled, in a different appeal, that Bobby and Suzanne could once again be admitted to see Terri, provided they made no effort to feed her. But terms were strict: no pictures could be distributed to our doctors to assist them in their evaluation of Terri’s condition, and Michael would have exclusive rights to any videotapes or still photographs of Terri. (back to text)
42 5. Kind of a recliner on wheels. (back to text)
43 1. To this day, we don’t know what it said. (back to text)
44 2. In his 2005 book, Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo’s Death, author Mark Fuhrman lists six possible scenarios of Terri’s collapse, one of which is that Michael and Terri struggled the night of February 25 and that he unwittingly got her in a choke hold, cutting off oxygen to her brain, which, at that time, could not have been visually detected or later revealed in Terri’s autopsy. (back to text)
45 3. Greer also relied on the testimony of the “impartial” doctor, Bambakidis, who sided with Michael. Soon after, we found out that Felos and Bambakidis’s brother belonged to the Order of American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association—but we couldn’t find conclusive evidence that Felos influenced Greer to pick him. As far as we know, this was the only trial Bambakidis testified in as an “expert witness.” (back to text)
46 4. Multiple boxes of documents were handed over to our initial attorneys. When Pat took over the case, she found them disorganized and out of chronological order. In his book Litigation as Spiritual Practice, Felos describes the maneuver as “the discovery game . . . Bury the smoking gun in a mountain of evidence . . . You strategically place your client’s incriminating internal memo among thousands of useless but similar looking data . . . do everything possible to give up as little as they can.” (back to text)
47 5. I do remember Terri having bruises on her arms and legs. She said they came from roughhousing with Michael. (back to text)
48 1. In fact, after we were prohibited from getting any of Terri’s medical information, it was sometimes revealed to us by one of her doctors, a few sympathetic nurses, and in one case a discharged patient. In addition, we would sometimes see antibiotic fluid hanging from her IV, and so knew she was receiving care. (back to text)
49 2. Additional stays had been granted, extending the date to October 15, 2003. (back to text)
50 3. Glenn’s loyalties to Terri and my family never stopped throughout the remaining years of Terri’s battle to live. He remains a close friend and is someone my family will be indebted to forever. (back to text)
51 4. April 1995 to July 1996. (back to text)
52 5. Another certified nursing assistant at Palm Gardens. (back to text)
53 1. Actually buffet tables were set up in front of the hospice. Food was supplied by church ministries, local restaurants, and ordinary people, all chipping
in to help us. (back to text)
54 1. We were told the hospice paid for the police protection. By the end, it added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. We thought that the money used to “protect” Terri could have so easily been spent on her rehabilitation. (back to text)
55 2. We immediately filed a grievance against Felos. It went nowhere. (back to text)
56 3. They might have been caused by the Hoyer lift which the nurses used to take her out of bed and put her back in each day. (back to text)
57 1. This angered Bishop Lynch, who later went so far as to claim nonsensically that Bobby had attacked him during a radio interview. (back to text)
58 2. Many of them were associated with the American Center for Law and Justice, a group that had lent their valuable support to us in 2003. (back to text)
59 1. It was after Felos’s accusation that we had tried to hurt Terri. (back to text)
60 2. A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully. In family law, a parent who has been denied custody of his or her child by a trial court may file a habeas corpus petition. (back to text)
61 3. The technicalities then and now were too complex for us to understand. We were only interested in results. (back to text)
62 4. Judge Greer was the only finder of fact in Terri’s case. (back to text)
63 5. James D. Whittemore, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. (back to text)
64 1. It continues to happen, virtually every day. But all we did was fight for our daughter’s life. Why does that make us celebrities? (back to text)
65 2. Our request for a neutral pathologist or a neutral observer was turned down. (back to text)
66 3. Mikey’s wife, C. B. (back to text)
67 4. Michael told Larry King that Terri collapsed at 4:30, and he confirmed the time to the medical examiner. The seventy-minute time lapse, as Mark Fuhrman writes in Silent Witness, is highly suspicious, pointing to a scenario that Michael and Terri fought, that Michael inadvertently got her in a stranglehold—a position that might not leave marks on her neck—and that she collapsed because oxygen could not reach her brain. The autopsy report confirmed Fuhrman’s theory that they would not find any signs of trauma to her neck just as when she was initially examined at Humana Northside. (back to text)
68 1. According to the British Medical Journal, it is misdiagnosed 43 percent of the time. (back to text)
69 2. www.katesjourney.com. (back to text)