According to reporter Jo Ciavaglia, the murder-suicide described in this article is “at least the third in Pennsylvania involving an elderly couple reported since June.”
Maybe that’s what inspired Ms Ciavaglia to reach out to some sources that are most often ignored in coverage of these cases.
Here is an excerpt from Murder-suicides among elderly an act of desperation:
They lived together and died together, but this was no romantic ending for the Middletown couple. Murder-suicide is what the coroner called it.
Jeanne Hoez, 90, had advanced Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive illness that left her unable to respond to her environment. Her husband, Charles, 92, was at his “wits’ end,” according to Bucks County Coroner Dr. Joseph Campbell.
Police believe that Charles strung a hose from the couple’s minivan through their first-floor bedroom window and pumped deadly carbon monoxide into the home. Their son, who lives in Upper Bucks County, found them dead in their bed Monday morning.
The Hoez murder-suicide is at least the third in Pennsylvania involving an elderly couple reported since June, a scenario that mental health experts say is driven by desperation, not adoration.
This is a real departure from the usual framing of these tragic events. All too often, the murder victim (usually the wife) is described as having died through a “mercy killing” and the perpetrator’s killing of her as an act of love. (Last year, of course, this framing of these tragedies was actively encouraged by the group “Conflation and Con Jobs.”)
Ms. Ciavaglia made the unusual step (for a reporter) of NOT calling a “right to die” advocacy group, but called some organizations devoted to prevention of suicide – in this case, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Through that organization, she found and shared the work of Donna J Cohen, who has done extensive research on this growing and alarming trend in the elderly population. We’ve shared some of her work in earlier blog entries.
Local groups devoted to suicide prevention and support for elderly persons are also used as sources in this story.
I wish we’d see more of this kind of story, but it’s really dependent on one particular reporter “getting” this aspect of the story. Unlike Conflation & Con Jobs, who appeared to be proactively reaching out to newsrooms when an elderly murder-suicide happened in a given community, I fear that organizations like the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention just waits by the phone for someone to call. (They’ll comment on this type of case, but I fear they’d probably express “no comment” when it comes to issues such as the suicide vigilante cult Final Exit Network.)
Or I could be wrong and now we’ll hear lots more from the AFSP and similar groups because they care passionately about preventing and reducing suicides for everyone in the population – including old, ill and disabled people. That would be a nice surprise. It would be worth being wrong this once. 😉 — Stephen Drake