Terri’s family members kept in the dark after tube’s removal

PINELLAS PARK (FBW)—A small crowd penned in by orange fencing in front of Woodside Hospice protested quietly Mar. 18, while inside, somewhere after 3 p.m. EST, the mechanism that allowed 41-year-old Terri Schiavo to be connected to a feeding tube twice a day to receive food and nourishment, was removed on a judge’s order.

“They have removed the tube,” a family member told Florida Baptist Witness at 4 p.m. Michael Vitadamo, whose wife, Suzanne, is Terri’s sister, had just returned to a small building across the street from the semi-secluded hospice facility.

Huddled together in a glass-enclosed store front, after being asked to leave the hospice at 1:45 p.m. EST, Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, were joined by Michael and Suzanne and other family friends. Bobby Schindler Jr., Terri’s brother, was in Washington D.C. throughout the day, pleading with lawmakers to save his sister’s life.

At 2:45 P.M., the family’s priest, Thaddeus Malanowski emerged briefly to speak with the Witness, while hordes of media hovered anxiously nearby. Over two dozen national and some international media outlets covered the parking lot with trucks, tents, cables and cameras.

Vitadamo said he and Suzanne had just visited with Terri and that she had been trying to speak with them and appeared alert. He said she was not hooked up to any kind of IV tube, but that her room looked different and she is sitting in a chair by the door with two police officers observing at all times. “They totally rearranged everything,” Vitadamo said.

“We are all in a quandary, we ourselves don’t know exactly what’s going on right now,” he said. According to the former military chaplain, the family was asked to leave so that hospice workers could begin preparing Terri for the removal of the tube, but at 2:45 someone inside the hospice indicated workers were waiting on a medical doctor to arrive.

Malanowski said he believed it was unfortunate the family was forced to rely on news reports to learn Terri’s starvation had begun, but said even Mary Schindler, Terri’s mother, was holding up well and showing little emotion.

“They are just hoping for the best,” Malanowski said.

Leaving the hospice, Michael Vitadamo, Terri’s sister’s husband, crossed the street in front of nearly three-dozen television cameras to rejoin those who remained in the private room. Terri’s parents and sisters had earlier left the room and returned to the hospice through a private entrance.

“It’s been removed,” Michael Vitadamo told the Witness. “Suzanne is in there right now with her.”

Recent events have not been easy on his wife, Vitadamo said carefully. Suzanne had earlier decined an interview with the Witness.

“We’re worried that all this action has done no good,” Vitadamo said. “All these powerful people and government getting involved and (yet) nobody seems to be able to usurp Judge Greer and his rulings. He seems to be able to have carte blanche of whatever he wants to do.

“It’s really difficult because you don’t want to lose faith in people,” Vitadamo said, in spite of the support and “love” from people throughout the world. It is especially hard when lawmakers and the “government which cries out for you to call upon them to serve you” appears to be out of reach.

“We just want to take care of Terri,” Vitadamo continued. “Let Michael get on with his life, let him do his thing. We don’t want anything from them. We just want Terri. She’s fine. We’ll take her just the way she is.”

Speaking of the future, Vitadamo admits taking care of Terri could be a significant responsibility and that her parents, Bob and Mary, are not getting any younger.

“We’re more than up for the job,” said Vitadamo, who is a small business owner and musician. “She’s our family. You don’t just leave disabled people behind.”

Speaking for both is wife and for Bobby Schindler, Jr., Vitadamo said they have all pledged to take care of Terri for “as long as she lives.”

Watching Terri day after day, secluded in the hospice in what amounts to “solitary confinement,” Vitadamo said it is hard for the family to think that someone like convicted murderer Scott Peterson has more rights and legal opportunities than does she.

And as the afternoon waned and the sun sank in the sky and the air turned chilly, supporters turned somber, sometimes kneeling in prayer, and at other times, singing hymns including, “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Victory in Jesus.”

Donna Kuntz, holding a sign, “Give Terri back to her family,” said the woman is by all medical accounts, a child, and as such, should be given back into the care of her family.

“Michael only had her a short time; her mother has had her since birth” said the Hillsborough County resident who is an area director for the Child Evangelism Fellowship and a member of Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa. “Terri is a like a child,” Kuntz said. “What I feel is happening is an absolute crime.”

Kuntz said Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband and legal guardian, does not have the right to make decisions for Terri because he has a conflict of interest by virtue of his extra-marital relationship with another woman with whom he has fathered two children.

“If this is not a conflict of interest, what is a conflict of interest?” Kuntz asked rhetorically. “I would love that to be answered because how do we know it’s not his girlfriend that really wants [Terri] dead?”

Concerned that guardianship laws have been completely disregarded in the case, Kuntz said society is judged by how they treat its weakest members.

“But by the grace of God, there go I,” said Kuntz. “She’s interacting every day, she is not terminal, she does not have cancer, her only crime is that she is disabled.”