91 Year Old Sharlotte Hydorn Is Selling $60 Suicide Kits And Business Is Booming

[Hellsbells]

A shadowy online company selling suicide kits recently claimed its first confirmed victim. Winston Ross talks exclusively with the entrepreneur behind it: a grieving 91-year-old woman.

The paramedics who showed up to Nick Klonoski’s house on Highland Drive four months ago discovered the 29-year-old’s lifeless body, covered up to the neck by a blanket. It was his brother Jake, detectives learned, who’d found Nick lying in his bed less than an hour beforehand, a clear plastic bag over his head, and a plastic tube running from the bag to an orange metal helium tank. Next to the tank was a white box, decorated with a butterfly, the box the plastic bag and tube had arrived in the mail in, with a book titled Final Exit inside.

“Is it the book and the kit?” asked the first police officers to arrive on the scene. The paramedics nodded knowingly. “Yep.”

These materials were assembled and sold to Klonoski last June for $60 by a company that calls itself the Gladd Group, which is not really a group at all. It’s a woman from the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, California, named Sharlotte Hydorn. She is 91 years old.

Each of the kits Hydorn assembles by hand is a simple contraption designed for a single purpose: people kill themselves with it by encasing their head in a bag of helium, which is lethal in pure form. People like Klonoski, the son of a U.S. district judge and whose funeral was attended by more than a thousand people. The Gladd Group’s estimated annual sales are $98,000. That means Sharlotte Hydorn sells more than 1,600 suicide kits every year.

“I’m too busy to cash the bloody checks,” she told The Daily Beast. “I haven’t made a deposit in three months.”

You have probably never heard of the helium-hood kit. Neither had Oregon State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, until he read a newspaper story published last month about Klonoski’s death. The horrified legislator quickly floated a bill to make it a Class C felony to sell such a kit. The first to testify at his April 11 hearing was one of Klonoski’s four brothers, Zach. Zach told the state senate judiciary panel that “my brother Nick was a beautiful person...It would be a disservice to him to remember him only for the way he died.”

Zach didn’t discuss his brother’s reasons for killing himself, but Nick’s mother, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken, told police he’d been running every day and had been in an upbeat mood, despite battling a severe cold over the past several weeks.

Klonoski’s brothers told the Eugene Register-Guard that he’d battled bouts of pain and fatigue for years without a diagnosis, that he was depressed about the effect that had on his life, and that he was worried he’d never regain his normal health.

“This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic.”

Klonoski wasn’t terminally ill, so he wouldn’t have qualified for lethal prescriptions provided to eligible Oregonians under the state’s Death With Dignity Act, one of only two states that allow assisted suicide. But he was able to buy Hydorn’s kit on the Internet, to rent a helium tank from nearby Party City for $175, and do the job himself.

This, an emotional Zach testified at the hearing earlier this month, should be illegal.

Though Hydorn admits she did sell Zach’s brother his implement of death, she makes no apology for it. She has a story of her own.

It was 30 years ago, Hydorn said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, that her husband, “a six-foot-four, wonderful, handsome, loving, intelligent man,” was dying of colon cancer. After several operations, the cancer had spread to his brain, and surgeons had cut a hole in his stomach, out of which came his excrement, into a bag.

“It was my duty, and I did it willingly, to empty that thing every three or four hours,” she said. “One time I ran out of bags and went all over town looking for a pharmacy that sold them. Even years after my husband died, I would wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to go get those bags.’ ”

No one should have to go through that, Hydorn said, to die a slow, painful death in a hospital bed. “Death should be with loved ones beside you, holding your hand."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/2...kxLXllYXItbw--

I don't think there is anything wrong with this.

Personal Choices are no business of politicians.

[gee]

The FBI carried out search warrants this week at the home of a 91-year-old San Diego County woman who allegedly sells do-it-yourself suicide kits in the mail.

Witnesses told KTLA News that agents removed computers and other records from the home of Sharlotte Hydorn on Wednesday.

The Associated Press reported that an Oregon man used one of the suicide kits to take his life earlier this year. According to AP's Tami Abdollah:

The death of 29-year-old Nick Klonoski has prompted Oregon lawmakers to consider outlawing the sale of suicide kits as they respond to a disturbing twist on the assisted suicide debate in the state. Law enforcement officials are also looking into the 91-year-old woman who sold the "helium hood" that killed Klonoski, with agents raiding her California home on Wednesday. The Oregon legislation, prompted by a March story in The Register-Guard of Eugene about Klonoski's death, would make it a felony to sell or transfer "any substance or objects to another person knowing" that person plans to use it to kill themselves.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano...kits.html#more

[Rockin Ma]

http://assistedsuicide.org/blog/2009...ium-hood-kits/

[Pete Bondurant]

I have a Walther PPK.

[Hellsbells]

Woman Who Sold Suicide Kits Pleads Guilty To Tax Charge

SAN DIEGO -- A retired school teacher who garnered national notoriety for selling kits designed to help people commit suicide pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a tax return.

In her plea, the El Cajon woman admitted that she failed to file federal income tax returns since 2007.
During the period in question, the defendant said she made more than $150,000 from various sources, including money from a pension, rental properties and the sale of helium hood kits designed to help people commit suicide.

Hydorn told investigators that while she anticipated her suicide kits would be used by the terminally ill, she made no effort to verify the physical condition, age, identity or mental condition of the customer.

Investigators said it was clear that Hydorn had no way of knowing if a suicide kit purchaser was simply depressed or a minor acting without the consent of a parent.
Authorities said the defendant sold the kits to anyone who mailed her $40.

According to court records, Hydorn sold approximately 1,300 suicide kits since 2007. Investigators said at least 50 of the kits were purchased by San Diego County residents. Four of those residents used the kits in 2010 to commit suicide, according to investigators.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, she will pay about $26,000 in outstanding taxes and agree not to participate in the sale or manufacture of helium suicide kits.
Hydorn has attributed her interest in assisted suicide to her husband's demise from colon cancer in 1977.

http://www.10news.com/news/29911530/detail.html

[Dakota Valkyrie]

A 93-year-old woman who made headlines by selling suicide kits from her California home was placed on five years of supervised probation on Monday and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine for a tax-related offense stemming from her mail-order business.

Sharlotte Hydorn, a great-grandmother and retired science teacher, pleaded guilty in December to a federal charge of failing to file income tax returns from 2007 through 2010, a period during which investigators said at least seven customers used her kits to kill themselves.

Prosecutors said Hydorn sold about 1,300 of the do-it-yourself asphyxiation hoods during those years but agreed to stop making or selling them as part of a plea deal.
[...]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8460X220120507

[moonlilly1981]

I am all for the death with dignity act for those who are terminally ill and persons who suffer from a chronic condition (although that part is not covered in the act). Who wants to die a slow painful death? Who wants to walk around in chronic pain every single day with no real relief? It takes away from that person's quality of life. If someone really wants to die, they are going to find a way to do so. This person was an adult, not a minor, who choose this.