Posted on 04/16/2005 8:15:30 AM PDT by kingattax
TAMPA, Fla. -- State investigators found no evidence that Terri Schiavo had been abused or exploited by either side of her family, according to documents released by Florida's Department of Children and Families.
The agency investigated 89 complaints dating back to 2001, when Schiavo's feeding tube was removed for the first time and the legal battle surrounding her right-to-die case intensified.
The calls alleged that the brain-damaged woman was being mistreated by her husband and her parents for financial gain. One complaint alleged that Schiavo's parents were selling videos of her through a Web site; another said Schiavo's husband wasn't spending money intended for her rehabilitation.
But investigators said they found no evidence that either her husband or parents were exploiting her, and often noted in their records that they found Schiavo well cared for on their visits to her Pinellas Park hospice.
The agency released the records Friday under court order.
Schiavo, 41, died last month after her feeding tube was removed for the third time, ending a bitter court battle between her husband, Michael Schiavo, and parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, over whether she would have wanted to live in a vegetative state.
The repeated allegations of abuse were based partly on bone scans showing Terri Schiavo suffered fractures and statements she made to family and friends that she was unhappy in her marriage.
Schiavo's husband has denied harming his wife. His lawyer said the fractures resulted from osteoporosis caused by the woman's years of immobility and complications of her medication.
Robert Schindler declined to comment there on the release of the DCF documents. An attorney for Michael Schiavo did not immediately return calls
This will take time but the truth will circulate despite the MSM bungles.
There has already been a shift in the polls.
The people will not let this rest.
I just clicked down to the last comment and saw your nasty comment. I don't know if Peach has had loss in her family, but I certainly have, no, I have not pulled anyone's plug, but then we never had plugs put in. No, I don't want to prolong the vegetative life of anyone who will never recover consciousness.
I shake my head at all the meanness, nastiness and venom from the side who claims to be the 'good' people. You should be ashamed of yourself. You don't care a twit about the actual people involved in really hard medical situations, only your own preening pride in how righteous you are. Well, let me tell you, actually having it happen to you is agony. No matter what treatment options are available. For you to sit on the sidewalk and throw rocks at grieving people is reprehensible. Have you ever claimed to be Christian?
You are the LAST person I would want involved in my medical decisions, or any in my family. I would want people who can ~think~, not just hiss agenda driven venom at other people about decisions you shouldn't be involved in. You are meddling in the decisions of other people you should have no right to be involved in.
And what have you learned?
What do you mean what have I learned? You mean aside from the fact that my freepmail and open forum pings was loaded with pings from people who have made the exact same decisions?
It's been disturbing, hasn't it, Hair? Painful for those who have made similar decisions.
You should have seen the front pages of our newspaper for weeks during this time. Filled with people who had made similar decisions, quietly, without fanfare but with great pain, who were now being called murderers.
As we get older, we've all faced these painful decisions whether to even start the life saving process with machines and once started, how long to permit it to continue. Thankfully we all trust each other in this family to handle the matter with care and love and trust.
How else could you know?
Yet ready to starve or dyhydrate. No sense letting your mom or dad, or son or daughter or spouse linger on, eh? No hope at all.
I guess God will have to sort this mess out.
__________________________
I think that's the most sensible comment I've seen about the whole situation!
Purging is awful. I had a sorority sister that did it for years. None of us knew, even though we lived with her. They can be very clever, almost like alcoholics, in covering their tracks.
What I know is that I do NOT want to be associated with this new idea that conservatives belong in the hospital and hospice rooms of every American... Yammering unfettered by the consequences their zealous agenda has on real people.
If you had an ounce of the compassion for the living you claim to have for the vegetative, no matter how long they have remained unchanged, no matter how hopeless their prognosis, you'd be worth talking to. But you don't. You have no real compassion, only a desire to win a voyeuristic internet argument you think you know all about but in fact you know nothing about.
Those who are struggling over whether they were right to pull the plug on a terminally ill relative are right to fear government intervention but Terri's case was different and that distinction is vitally important.
Terri was not terminal and it was unfair for anyone to put guilt on others for their decisions to let their already dying family members go.
I think the tactic was inhuman myself and meant to pull people into an argument for Terri's death when they might not otherwise have done it.
This was play on peoples emotions big time and very wrong.
So painful. Yet if so painful, if truly so painful, why then are you so motivated to defend that action? Does not the truth stand on its own two feet? For surely it does!
The pain has many roots, including the sad situation your beloved one was in -- but the pain continuance is in the doubt -- your own doubt -- that you made the wrong decision.
That can not be! We can never murder our own beloveds! What horror! You fight it -- what sanity is their except in the fiercest of denials that it was wrong.
And maybe it wasn't some cases are different, I can mention some, yet they are rare -- yet the ferocity of the denial that starving -- pullng the tube -- is not murder, but love. That ferocity, your own ferocity on this issue and many others -- a tell.
You live. May you live a long time and find before you yourself die some recovery of a wrong you happened to be conned into joining.
Massive stroke victims, who have lost all cognitive ability, are not terminal either, but plugs and tubes are removed, if indeed they are ever inserted, every day of the week.
Otherwise, I thought, for what it's worth, that your last post showed at least a willingness to discuss this matter calmly and without casting stones. Which is how this important matter should be discussed.
Not meaning a lecture at you, but merely a comment in general.
Okay -- an accidental murder! Manslaughter lesser degree. Convinced by the spirit of the times and the seemingly unendless stream of bills -- for what end. Worse and worse my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, my spouse, became -- they told me no possible recovery, that pulling the feeding tube was kind and gentle. Painless.
What demons mustered we all have to us!
Not buy what? That Congress has moved far away from this issue? That people are ticked off at Congress getting involved?
There's nothing to buy. Every poll I've seen, from every news outlet, support the statement. You may not agree with the process, but you can't deny that the majority of people fully understand that Congress should not get involved in personal end of life issues. It is between the doctors and family.
No one is confused. This case is the most litigated, discussed, dissected and argued case in history. We all think we know the situation very well... and none of us had any right to know it at all.
But I appreciate your decision to not take part in the ugly allegations directed at anyone who disagrees on the issues involved.
Doctors recommended that MS pull the tube in '93. He refused. For what it's worth.
It takes some nerve to say that murderers have been writing me.
Whatever kind of Christian you think you are, I want no part of it. You're a disgrace to Christians everywhere. How dare you.
If a massive stroke victim is brain dead..then they are terminal.
Terminally brain dead is not what we were talking about with Terri.
It all seems quite simple to me..no terminal diagnosis..no death.
You've obviously never faced decisions when a doctor tells you there is no hope.
I do hope you don't write to me again. Your tone is ugly, hostile and beneath contempt.
Agreed.... step out into the light....
It's not on Terri threads.
Massive stroke victims aren't brain dead. The ones I'm talking about anyway. The ones who aren't on ventilators but merely feeding tubes.
But they have no cognitive brain activity and never will.
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