Thread: The 91-Year-Old Woman Selling Suicide Kits

Winston Ross – Wed Apr 27, 11:38 pm ET

NEW YORK – A shadowy online company selling suicide kits recently claimed its first confirmed victim. Winston Ross talks exclusively with the entrepreneur behind it: a grieving 91-year-old woman.

The paramedics who showed up to Nick Klonoski’s house on Highland Drive four months ago discovered the 29-year-old’s lifeless body, covered up to the neck by a blanket. It was his brother Jake, detectives learned, who’d found Nick lying in his bed less than an hour beforehand, a clear plastic bag over his head, and a plastic tube running from the bag to an orange metal helium tank. Next to the tank was a white box, decorated with a butterfly, the box the plastic bag and tube had arrived in the mail in, with a book titled Final Exit inside.

“Is it the book and the kit?” asked the first police officers to arrive on the scene. The paramedics nodded knowingly. “Yep.”

These materials were assembled and sold to Klonoski last June for $60 by a company that calls itself the Gladd Group, which is not really a group at all. It’s a woman from the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, California, named Sharlotte Hydorn. She is 91 years old.

Each of the kits Hydorn assembles by hand is a simple contraption designed for a single purpose: people kill themselves with it by encasing their head in a bag of helium, which is lethal in pure form. People like Klonoski, the son of a U.S. district judge and whose funeral was attended by more than a thousand people. The Gladd Group’s estimated annual sales are $98,000. That means Sharlotte Hydorn sells more than 1,600 suicide kits every year.

“I’m too busy to cash the bloody checks,” she told The Daily Beast. “I haven’t made a deposit in three months.”

You have probably never heard of the helium-hood kit. Neither had Oregon State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, until he read a newspaper story published last month about Klonoski’s death. The horrified legislator quickly floated a bill to make it a Class C felony to sell such a kit. The first to testify at his April 11 hearing was one of Klonoski’s four brothers, Zach. Zach told the state senate judiciary panel that “my brother Nick was a beautiful person...It would be a disservice to him to remember him only for the way he died.”

Zach didn’t discuss his brother’s reasons for killing himself, but Nick’s mother, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken, told police he’d been running every day and had been in an upbeat mood, despite battling a severe cold over the past several weeks. Klonoski’s brothers told the Eugene Register-Guard that he’d battled bouts of pain and fatigue for years without a diagnosis, that he was depressed about the effect that had on his life, and that he was worried he’d never regain his normal health.

“This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic.”

Klonoski wasn’t terminally ill, so he wouldn’t have qualified for lethal prescriptions provided to eligible Oregonians under the state’s Death With Dignity Act, one of only two states that allow assisted suicide. But he was able to buy Hydorn’s kit on the Internet, to rent a helium tank from nearby Party City for $175, and do the job himself.

This, an emotional Zach testified at the hearing earlier this month, should be illegal. “In a society where so many people suffer from depression and other mental-health disorders,” Zach said, “this company has found their niche in the market by peddling death. This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic. The Gladd company, so named as to avoid suspicion in case family members happen to sign for or come across the package, made $60 off my brother’s death.”

Though Hydorn admits she did sell Zach’s brother his implement of death, she makes no apology for it. She has a story of her own.

It was 30 years ago, Hydorn said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, that her husband, “a six-foot-four, wonderful, handsome, loving, intelligent man,” was dying of colon cancer. After several operations, the cancer had spread to his brain, and surgeons had cut a hole in his stomach, out of which came his excrement, into a bag.

“It was my duty, and I did it willingly, to empty that thing every three or four hours,” she said. “One time I ran out of bags and went all over town looking for a pharmacy that sold them. Even years after my husband died, I would wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to go get those bags.’ ”

No one should have to go through that, Hydorn said, to die a slow, painful death in a hospital bed. “Death should be with loved ones beside you, holding your hand."

Not long after her husband died, Hydorn met a man named Derek Humphry, a longtime advocate of assisted suicide and founder of the Hemlock Society, which has worked to change laws prohibiting the practice around the country. It was Humphry, in 1992, who penned Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, which effectively serves as a manual for how to kill yourself and which Humphry told The Register-Guard sold 500,000 copies in the first six weeks.

Hydorn includes the book in the helium kits she sells. She joined the Hemlock Society (which has since merged with another group and renamed itself winstonross.wordpress.com.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/1...hontheinternet

comments

So Why the heck doesn't the Prisons use this , instead of all the Chemical controversy ?

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It is said that the most cost to tax payers for medicare is in the last 90 days of life. We keep our dying loved ones sustained on life support for our own benefit, not theirs. We should learn to let go and let them go in peace. Now those that just want to leave this world because they are depressed is a different story entirely. Those people need to learn to go on with life's struggles.

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Not that I agree with the woman selling this stuff, but the guy was planning on killing himself and the kit was just a way to do it. If there wass no kit he would have found some other way, say jumping out a window, stepping in front of a train...

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Uhhhh......its illegal for a person to kill themselves but they can kill others and get probation?

Something is wrong with our system ya think?

California seller of suicide kits sentenced for tax offense
By Marty Graham | Reuters – 14 hrs ago

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - A 93-year-old woman who made headlines by selling suicide kits from her California home was placed on five years of supervised probation on Monday and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine for a tax-related offense stemming from her mail-order business.

Sharlotte Hydorn, a great-grandmother and retired science teacher, pleaded guilty in December to a federal charge of failing to file income tax returns from 2007 through 2010, a period during which investigators said at least seven customers used her kits to kill themselves.

Prosecutors said Hydorn sold about 1,300 of the do-it-yourself asphyxiation hoods during those years but agreed to stop making or selling them as part of a plea deal.

Hydorn gained notoriety after one of her mail-order customers in Oregon, Nicholas Klonoski, 29, described by his family as suffering from depression but otherwise healthy, used an "exit kit" to kill himself in December 2010.

Outrage over that case led Oregon state lawmakers to pass legislation to ban sales of such devices, even though Oregon is one of two U.S. states with laws legalizing physician-assisted suicide for people with incurable, fatal illnesses.

The San Diego County district attorney, who was a party to the settlement, agreed not to prosecute Hydorn for her role in any of the six known deaths that occurred in California.

But the federal judge who sentenced Hydorn in San Diego rendered a finding that her suicide kit business was illegal under California law.

Hydorn was prosecuted under the U.S. tax code because "the sale of suicide kits is not a violation of federal law," assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Mazza said after the sentencing.

"This case was never about the position that someone has the right to end their own life. This was about her indiscriminate sale of kits to anyone who wrote her a check."

Hydorn has said her product was intended to help terminally ill people end their lives with dignity at home.

The kits, priced at $60 each including instructions and shipping, consisted of a plastic hood that closed around the neck, and tubing that connected the hood to a tank of gas.

Hydorn acknowledged selling the kits over the past 20 years, but insisted that she made little money from the enterprise. The government estimated she grossed $40,000 from the sales.

http://news.yahoo.com/california-sui...185006954.html

comments

There are hundreds of ways to kill yourself. Heck, a gun is pretty dang easy to get and use. Yet an old lady comes up with a way to do it in a dignified, non messy way and she is public enemy #1. What is especially offensive is when the government decides it doesn't like something that is legal (since they said there is no law against this) and comes up with a backdoor way of going after her.

That said, she should have paid taxes. I just don't like that it wasn't the real reason they went after her.

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I'm curious as to how much money the government spent to prosecute (persecute?) this woman. I'll wager more than the $40,000 she is alleged to have made over 20 years.

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Anytime the authorities can't decide whether what you are doing is illegal, They use the Jimmy Hoffa trick. TAX EVASION