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HD on TV

On January 2, 2004, Huntington’s disease was featured on the news magazine program Dateline NBC in a story entitled “Shattered Lives: Shots in the Dark.” In 2002, a Georgia woman named Carol Carr fatally shot her two adult sons, HD sufferers Andy and Randy Scott, who were living in a nursing home. Originally charged with two counts of first-degree murder with malicious intent, she pleaded guilty to assisted suicide and was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison and five years of probation.

In the Dateline interview, Carr claimed that she was honoring her sons’ wishes to end their suffering once they reached the later stages of the disease. Both her mother-in-law and husband had already died from HD, and when her sons were diagnosed with the same disease, they decided that they did not want to succumb to the same type of death. Carr and her sons entered into a suicide pact, each taking an overdose of painkillers and antidepressants on Christmas Eve of 1998, but the attempt failed. Her sons’ condition continued to decline to the point where they could no longer walk, talk, feed, bathe, or dress themselves. Eventually, Carr decided to place them in a local nursing home. While visiting them on the night of June 9, 2002, she took their lives with a handgun and waited in the lobby of the nursing home for the police to arrive.

Last Modified: 04/12/2007

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