Posted on 03/22/2005 1:38:04 AM PST by ambrose
Posted on Tue, Mar. 22, 2005
THE HUSBAND
Friends: Michael Schiavo good, loyal
The friends of Michael Schiavo spoke out on his behalf, describing him as a decent man who never abandoned his stricken wife.
BY SANDY BAUERS
Knight Ridder News Service
PHILADELPHIA - Friends praise Michael Schiavo
He has been vilified on websites and talk shows. He has been called a wife-abuser, an adulterer, a money-grubbing murderer.
Death threats have been left in his mailbox.
Throngs of protesters have waved signs and chanted outside his house in Clearwater, and they have gathered again.
Sometimes, even Michael Schiavo's friends have wondered why, in the face of all that, he didn't just walk away.
It would have been easier for him to relinquish guardianship of his severely incapacitated wife, Terri, to her parents.
So why not give it up, leave Terri's feeding tube in, let her parents care for her? After all, he is living with another woman now and they have two children.
''Because he's sticking by what he promised,'' Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, said. ``He wants to honor the last thing he can give to her.''
Physicians have testified that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and will never improve. Michael Schiavo has said his wife told him she would not want to live like this.
Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, say she is responsive and can be helped. They say that, as a Catholic, she would choose life at all costs.
Intensely private, according to his family and friends, Michael Schiavo has rarely spoken publicly about the matter, out of respect for his wife's privacy.
But in recent days he has gone on national TV to reiterate that Terri would not want to live like this and to criticize politicians for getting involved in what he said is a deeply personal matter.
His brother and friends also have said it's time to speak up.
''We're tired of it. It's time people know who he is,'' said Scott Schiavo, who lives in Levittown, Pa.
The thing is, even if Michael Schiavo wins the final court battle, and Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is removed, he really hasn't won at all, Scott said. ``He's already lost Terri.''
His brother and friends describe Michael Schiavo as social within his circle of friends but otherwise almost reclusive. Except for the No Trespassing sign on his front lawn and the armed guards he occasionally has hired to protect his home, he has tried to grasp whatever shreds of normalcy he can.
Michael Schiavo, 41, was the youngest of five boys. Six-foot-seven, athletic and model-handsome, he met Terri Schindler at Bucks County Community College near Philadelphia in 1982.
Married two years later, they moved to Florida. On Feb. 25, 1990, Michael Schiavo has testified, he awoke to find Terri on the floor in the hallway, unconscious.
They had been married five years.
He has spent the last 15 years first trying to bring her back, then trying to let her go, his friends and brother say.
In the beginning, they say, Schiavo was relentless in his search for a cure for his wife. He tried therapies. He rented a house large enough for him and Terri's parents.
He made sure she was dressed every day. He applied her makeup and dabbed on perfume.
He went to school to become a nurse, ''because he wanted to take care of Terri,'' Scott said. 'He swore that he could get Terri better. One doctor said: `Mike, you know what? There's nothing else we can do. The next time Terri gets sick, why don't you just let nature take its course?' And Mike wouldn't do it.''
Many of the defining moments of Michael Schiavo's life have revolved around death.
In 1988, his grandmother was hospitalized with a serious illness and signed a ''do not resuscitate'' order, Scott Schiavo said. When she worsened one night, no one looked at her records.
''It took them I don't know how long to get her breathing again. They stuck a ventilator down her throat.'' To little avail. ''She was brain-dead,'' Scott Schiavo recounted.
After the funeral, Scott and Terri sat next to each other at a large table, where they discussed how upset their grandmother would have been at her final hours.
Terri turned to him, Scott Schiavo said, 'and she said, `Not me, no way, I don't want that.' She says, 'If I'm ever like that, oh, don't let me. Pull that tube out of me.' '' Scott Schiavo said he testified about the conversation in 2000.
Several years after Terri collapsed, Michael Schiavo's mother developed cancer.
Eventually, medical complications required the removal of her feeding tube, Scott said. 'It's not like we said: `Turn it off.' ''
She was kept ''peaceful and out of pain'' until she died, Scott said.
Then their father died.
Eventually, Scott said, his brother realized he would have to let Terri go, too.
The Schindlers -- who did not respond to an interview request through their lawyer -- have been distrustful of his motives partly because, they have said, no one mentioned Terri's wishes until years after her collapse.
But, Scott said, ``It's not something you think about while Mike's trying to save her life.''
This particular fight has not come without a price.
''I give Mike all the credit in the world, because I would have snapped already. I know how bad it hurts me when I hear people talking about him and downing him,'' Scott Schiavo said.
Michael Schiavo met his girlfriend, identified in court records as Jodi Centonze, about a decade ago.
Initially, Bonnie Rowley, who was Centonze's friend, didn't know what to think. The court battles had not yet heated up, but she knew the situation with Terri.
When Rowley met Michael Schiavo, she said she noticed first his ``great smile, a gentle smile.''
Gradually, her respect grew: ``He could have stepped off and divorced Terri five years ago, when this really hit the court. And got married and started his family that way.''
The couple has two toddlers -- a daughter and a son. Michael Schiavo works in the medical unit of the Pinellas County Jail.
Both Centonze and Michael Schiavo had to face ''their own moral dilemmas as far as having children out of wedlock,'' Rowley said. ``But the two of them weren't getting any younger. So does that make him a bad person because he did that? Did he fluff his responsibility to Terri at any point? No.''
It is Centonze, Scott Schiavo said, who now does all Terri's laundry. ``She's been unbelievable. She supported Mike in everything he did. She's gone with Mike to visit Terri. She's helped Mike clean Terri up.''
Centonze has been a flash point for some of Michael Schiavo's critics, who think it is a reason to disqualify him to be Terri's guardian. His living with Centonze ''abrogates the covenant of marriage,'' said Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, who was among the demonstrators outside the hospice on Friday.
Looking back on it now, Scott thinks his brother ''just wanted somebody to love him.'' He equates it with a widower who remarries, ``but it doesn't mean that that person stopped loving their spouse that passed on.''
In a way, Michael Schiavo has said he can sympathize with Terri's parents. ''I have children, and, you know, I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to lose a child,'' he said in an interview on ABC's Nightline last week.
But, he said, ``They know the condition Terri is in. They were there in the beginning. They heard the doctors. They know that Terri's in a persistent vegetative state.''
He said Terri would ``always be a part of my life.
``And to sit here and be called a murderer and an adulterer by people that don't know me, and a governor stepping into my personal, private life, who doesn't know me either? And using his personal gain to win votes, just like the legislators are doing right now, pandering to the religious right, to the people up there, the antiabortion people, standing outside of Tallahassee?
``What kind of government is this? This is a human being. This is not right.''
Where is the barf alert?
What a load of crap. For that sentence to be true, he would not be shacked up with another woman he's fathered 2 kinds with, and he would not be trying to get the legal system to kill Terri for him.
In other news, it turns out that the DA never investigated whether Terri's injuries were inflicted by her husband, because the medical record of those injuries was not released to them until 2002, well after Florida's 4-year statute of limitations on attempted murder.
I'm glad the guy has friends, at least he will have different places to live here and there, because I think the American Public in general are going to harangue this guy for life.
I get the impression that he is a jerk from what I read.
But, what do I know, I'm not one of his friends.
The solution is to respect her wishes.
Which never encompassed STARVATION.
But if Michael's telling the truth, then Teri wouldn't want that, in which case it would the absolutely wrong decision. And besides, I think the parents are too delusional for Teri to be left in their care.
Terri was getting ready to divorce this creep.
If she just knew what had happened and still was happening with him and Jodi, she would certainly say "not over my dead body am I going to let you call me a bitch, ask why I won't die, and starve me to death."
What? When did you hear/come up with this little piece of propaganda?
When do the lies and smears cease?
I can only say what I'd do.
I'd turn her care over to her parents.
That was an asssertion by one of her friends tonight on Greta's show.
And Scott Peterson's friends thought he was charming too.
Some of the deadliest men were super charming to everyone except those they abused.
But if he agreed to that, then he'd have to divorce her in order to marry his fiancee.
And he'd lose half his net worth.
Unfortunately, that requires a Vulcan mind meld. Got a Vulcan handy?
Yes, they're hysterical.
Understandably.
They're seeing what they want to see.
I do firmly believe she's PVS.
I am grateful it's not my decision.
We have courts to make these determinations. The court here determined that she'd rather not live in this condition. End of story.
He wouldn;t HAVE to divorce her.
He could merely bow out.
I don't believe it's monetary with him.
He turned down a valid offer of $1 million
from a man in San Diego.
What? When did you hear/come up with this little piece of propaganda?
When do the lies and smears cease?
On FoxNews, Gretta had on several of Terri's friends, including one who related a story about Terri wanting to move in with her, because they both wanted out of their marriages.
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