An autistic teenager was murdered by his mother to “end his suffering.
Cook County prosecutors said a west suburban woman and family caregiver planned for at least a week to kill the mother’s 14-year-old son, because they believed he wasn’t getting sufficient care for his autism.
CBS 2’s Mike Puccinelli reports Alex Spourdalakis was found dead from multiple stab wounds on Sunday in the River Grove apartment he shared with his mother and godmother. The two women were found nearby in a semi-conscious state.
His mother, 50-year-old Dorothy Spourdalakis, and his live-in caregiver and godmother, 44-year-old Jolanta Skrodzka, have been charged with first-degree murder. At a bond hearing at the Maywood courthouse on Wednesday, a judge ordered both women held without bail.
Prosecutors said the two women plotted for a week to kill Alex, who suffered from a severe form of autism, because they thought he had received inadequate medical care, and wanted to put him out of his misery.
Now, where might they have gotten the idea that an acceptable response to suffering is killing the sufferer?
I suspect many will be horrified–not by the killing but the method, and the unavailability of “death with dignity” euthanasia. Indeed, I recall when Canadian farmer Robert Latimer murdered his 12 year-old daughter Traci because she had cerebral palsy. Rather than condemning the monster, many Canadians asked, “Why couldn’t a doctor have done it for him?”
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Secondhand Smoke.
