If the Schiavo case has a familiar ring to people from Missouri, that's because John Ashcroft did exactly same thing to another grieving family when he was Governor of Missouri. Here is what the victim's father has to say today:
Busalacchi's daughter, Christine, died in 1993, after her father won a two-year legal struggle to remove her feeding tube. His daughter, like Schiavo, was in a persistent vegetative state.
Busalacchi said he feels for all of Schiavo's family - her parents and siblings who want to keep her alive, as well as her husband, who says his wife would not have wanted her life prolonged.
But he also despairs about the direction the case has taken.
"This has reached the absurd for the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate to join in this fray," Busalacchi said in a telephone interview Sunday from his home in St. Charles.
Busalacchi's daughter was pulled from a wrecked and burning car on her father's birthday, May 29, 1987. She was 17. In a desperate attempt to keep her alive, doctors removed a large part of her brain. Her father, a widower, authorized the insertion of a feeding tube. "I wanted her to get better. A year later, I might have had different thoughts," said Busalacchi.
He still resents the intrusion of John Ashcroft, then governor of Missouri, who intervened to prevent the removal of his daughter's feeding tube.
Busalacchi recalled that he had "20 or 30 doctors look at her" before he decided what to do.
"I was with her, I clipped her fingernails, I talked to her," he said. "Once I turned on music real loud and danced around her bedside and believe me, if anything could have, that would have evoked laughter. I tried to tell funny stories. I got no reaction."
Busalacchi said he is surrounded in his home by pictures of his daughter, and he remembers her every day. "I'm not as strongly angry as I was," he said. "But I'd love to talk to John Ashcroft some day. He just injected his own religious beliefs in my daughter's case."
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