ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, August 20, 1996 TAG: 9608200056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CARTERVILLE, MO.
SOURCE: Associated Press
JOE CRUZAN DIDN'T WANT to be a leader in euthanasia issues. But his daughter's condition broke his heart.
A sheet-metal worker with only a high school education, Joe Cruzan reluctantly waged a battle of national proportions to break new legal ground in the right-to-die movement.
In the end, though, he was just a father whose heart was broken beyond repair when a 1983 auto accident left his daughter Nancy in a persistent vegetative state. Without publicity, without a fight in court, Joe Cruzan asserted his own right to die this weekend.
He hanged himself in the privacy of his carport.
``Psychiatrists tell us that the loss of a child is the single greatest harm the human psyche could suffer,'' said William Colby, a lawyer who helped the Cruzans' legal fight to have Nancy's feeding tube removed. ``That loss opened a wound that never really closed again.''
Police found Cruzan's body Saturday in the carport of his home after they were called by his wife, Joyce. He had left a suicide note on the dining room table telling her to call police, apparently so she wouldn't see his body. No other details of the note were released.
Cruzan was buried Monday alongside his daughter, whose headstone includes the inscription: ``Departed Jan. 11, 1983. At Peace Dec. 26, 1990.''
``We know he has found peace and he and Nan are watching over us and with us always,'' Cruzan's daughter, Chris White, wrote in a eulogy read during a graveside service.
Friends of the 62-year-old Cruzan blamed his death on his sorrow after his daughter's accident and the heart-wrenching, four-year battle to remove the life-sustaining care that he said she would not have wanted.
``He was receiving a great deal of animosity and opposition,'' said the Rev. Kevin O'Rourke, director of the Center for Health Care Ethics at St. Louis University health sciences center. ``These things went deep - the anguish, the suffering he was put through. That went deeper than anyone realized and seemed to inflict psychological wounds that couldn't heal.''
Cruzan, who was married and had two other daughters, couldn't even stand to see those who cursed him suffer.
One day Cruzan watched protesters shivering outside the Missouri Rehabilitation Center, where his daughter lay in a coma. He drove to a Wal-Mart nearby, bought an extension cord and a coffee maker, and carried out steaming cups to those who were fighting against him, said Van Benson, Cruzan's nephew.
``He was a sensitive man and a compassionate man and cared about people,'' said Benson, who officiated at Cruzan's funeral. ``When he saw other people hurting, he hurt too.''
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB