mtpolitics.net

Knock Me Over With A Feather

My Saturday morning routine is like this (with some parts excised because this is, after all, a family blog): Get out of bed, stumble into kitchen, start coffee, check email.

Usually, I don’t get much of anything — even the hate mail has slowed up some. I must be losing my touch.

Anyway, I’ve been using the Google News alerts to email me links when certain events happen. It’s very cool, and only rarely sends irrelevant items.

I expected to get at least one alert this morning, as related to my earlier post so I didn’t pay too much attention to it when I first opened the alert. I clicked on the article, and began to compose the previous post.

As is my habit, I’ll often click over to read something else in the middle of a post while I try to get my thoughts together. (All two of them.) So, I went back to my mail client (Thunderbird, in case you were wondering) and read the rest of the alerts.

There was one entitled, “Doctor faces murder charges for ‘mercy killings’.” Mercy killings? Ennis?

Long story short (yeah, right), it was the doctor who used to practice in our local clinic before he hung out his own shingle. I always thought of him as mainly goofy, and a borderline quack, so I guess I’m not overly surprised now that I’ve had a couple hours or so to digest the news.

My first reaction was an out loud, “Oh my God.”

The odd thing is that the incident was right around a year ago, in the same time frame as Jamie’s murder. Give or take a little bit, but given the previous murder rate (essentially zero since the beginning of time) in Ennis, that’s quite a coincidence. (Later article indicates that the euthanasia occurred in 2000.)

In reading the article, I get the distinct impression that he knew what he was doing, and went ahead and did it.

But Bischoff said charges weren’t filed earlier because none of the family members were willing to testify against him.

[. . .]

“I gave her a shot to make her feel more comfortable and ease her suffering,” he said. “Three or four of her family members wrote me thank you letters.” (Emphasis mine. –Ed.)

This is just bizarre.

[UPDATE: 12:26]:  It gets more horrifying:

Bischoff’s federally controlled substance registration was suspended on June 28 after the Drug Enforcement Agency concluded that he had written prescriptions for himself for drugs, including the narcotic painkiller Oxycontin, and couldn’t account for some 32,000 doses of controlled substances.

Bischoff also is charged with felony counts of fraudulently obtaining dangerous drugs, criminal distribution of dangerous drugs and criminal possession with intent to distribute dangerous drugs.

The charges claim that Bischoff obtained 48,000 dosage units of drugs including Adderall - a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - and narcotic painkillers without diagnosed and documented medical need between September 2002 and 2003. Bischoff allegedly obtained the drugs with telephone orders that were delivered to his residence.

[. . .]

Last spring, Kenneth and Connie Sciuchetti accepted a $250,000 judgment from Bischoff and the Madison Valley Hospital after their son, Douglas, died in August 1999 under Bischoff’s care.

Court records said Sciuchetti checked into the hospital with severe back pain. He had earlier been involved in an industrial accident in Spokane, Wash. While in the hospital, the patient was prescribed a number of drugs by Bischoff that, according to a coroner’s report, eventually killed him, said the court records.

This is just absolutely shocking. I’m thankful that neither the Spousal Unit™ nor I were ever under his care.