"Better Off Dead"

"I've just finished Jerry," whispered Louis Greenfield hoarsely to the doorman of his Bronx apartment house one morning last week. "I gave my little boy chloroform. . . . He's better off dead."

When the police led him away, Greenfield, a tired little milliner, told them the whole story. For 17 grey, hopeless years he had washed, dressed and fed his imbecile son. He bought him blocks and tin soldiers, read sense into his harsh animal cries. On Sundays he would lead the shuffling child, who was almost a head taller than he, past neighbors' eyes into the park. Both Louis Greenfield and his wife, Anna, stinted themselves, sent the boy to hospitals, neurologists, special schools. But modern science could teach him nothing, could not even relieve painful convulsions that attacked him every few weeks. At first Louis and Anna refused to believe the doctors' verdict that their Jerry would never grow beyond the mental age of two. Later they had to accept it.

At the autopsy Assistant Medical Examiner Charles Herman Hochman reported that he had found malformation of the cerebellum (section of the brain controlling movement) as well as an undeveloped thyroid gland, and an enlarged thymus. The thymus gland is found only in young children, normally disappears at adolescence.

Oddly, New York psychiatrists promptly condemned Greenfield, called him a murderer who had simply grown tired of caring for his imbecile son. Toward euthanasia, the medical profession is inclined to be kinder. Laymen were sympathetic, and even District Attorney Samuel John Foley, who will ask a Bronx grand jury for an indictment this week, admitted that he was reluctant to prosecute such "a sad case."

Few hardheaded psychiatrists or softhearted laymen realized that: 1) mercy killings now occur in the U. S. at the rate of one a week; 2) mercy killers are almost never convicted; 3) stiffest penalty imposed in recent years was three months in prison.* If a grand jury refuses to indict Louis Greenfield, it will add one more brick to the foundation of unwritten law condoning mercy killings. It will also strengthen the case of euthanasia advocates, headed by Manhattan's famed Neurologist Foster Kennedy. Euthanasiasts decry mercy killings by overwrought relatives, plump for a tightly written law which will set up impartial committees of physicians to examine hopeless invalids, recommend scientific extinction.

* Statistics of the Euthanasia Society.

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