ATLANTA — The man told Thomas Goodwin he wanted to kill himself to end the pain of pancreatic cancer. But first he wanted to go downstairs to get a photograph of his wife.
So Goodwin — president of Final Exit Network, one of the nation’s most prominent assisted-suicide groups — waited in the bedroom for the man to return.
Instead, agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation burst in and arrested Goodwin on Wednesday for violating the state’s assisted- suicide law. They also opened a new front in a resurgent war over Americans’ rights to take their own lives.
Other right-to-die activists have been fighting for — and in some key cases recently, winning — the legal right to assisted suicide. But volunteers from Goodwin’s 5-year-old nonprofit organization have focused on quietly visiting the bedsides of Americans and offering suicide instructions, which they prefer to call “guidance to self-deliverance.”
Using a system that incorporates a plastic hood and helium tanks available at many party supply stores, the group has helped about 200 people living in pain end their lives peacefully, said Derek Humphry, chairman of the group’s advisory board.
John Bankhead, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman, said the sting operation helped investigators verify the methods used by the Final Exit group. Technically, however, the criminal charges stem from the June 19, 2008, suicide of John Celmer, a 58-year-old cancer patient from Cumming, Ga.
According to an affidavit filed by investigators, Celmer was “cancer free at the time of his death,” although he was embarrassed about his appearance after surgeries for head and neck cancer. He also suffered from arthritis pain.
Celmer apparently wrote the group in May, saying he wanted to die using the helium method. In the letter, he said he would “pathetically” take “measures into my own hands” if they didn’t come to his aid.
After Celmer’s death, his wife found one of the letters, as well as “release forms” he had signed for the group. Celmer’s family called authorities, and in a subsequent taped phone call with Celmer’s son, Final Exit member Claire Blehr, 76, of Atlanta, said that she and Goodwin, the president of the Atlanta- area group, were with Celmer when he died.
Blehr was arrested Wednesday in Georgia and remains in custody. Lawrence Egbert, a visiting assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the group’s medical director, was arrested and jailed in Baltimore.
A fourth alleged member of the group, Nicolas Alec Sheridan, 60, of Baltimore, was also charged but is not in custody.
All are charged with assisted suicide, tampering with evidence and violation of Georgia’s racketeering and corrupt influences act.
Colorado group part of probe
John Bankhead of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said its investigation of Final Exit has spread to eight other states — Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and Montana — to determine whether some of those members are linked to other suicides in Georgia.
