A Life That Matters (13 page)

“The police made us leave the building. Someone told Michael about the incident, and Bobby and I were banned from going to the hospice again, which meant that if Terri died then, we wouldn’t be allowed to be with her.”
¹

The following day, I decided to take some of Terri’s stuff home—make-work so I didn’t have to think of the future. On the way home, we all stopped at the McDonald’s around the corner. Bob and Bobby went inside to order a cup of coffee; Suzanne and I stayed in the parking lot.

Bob’s cell phone rang. The call was from Chris O’Connell, a reporter from Bay News 9, the local cable station in the Tampa Bay area. The family, and Bobby in particular, had built up a good relationship with Chris. He had a cousin in a similar condition as Terri’s, so he could probably empathize—at any rate, he was always nice to us, and we liked him.

He asked Bob if we’d come down to do an interview. But I didn’t want to go. I just did not want to go. My daughter’s feeding tube had just been removed, and I was in no condition to do anything. I wanted to be home. That was my only wish: to be home.

“We were out in the parking lot,” Bobby remembers. “I said to my dad, ‘You know, Chris has been pretty good to us. Maybe you can appeal to the public for help. The station’s on the way home. Why don’t we stop and give him a quick interview?’

“Dad agreed. He said, ‘Okay, we’ll stop for Chris.’

“And that was the biggest decision ever made in the case.”

Bobby continues:

“Dad was interviewed outside the station by Chris. Mom and Suzy waited with me in the parking lot. I got out of the car. A man named Tim Boyle, a senior producer at the station, came up to me.

“‘It’s funny meeting you here,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about you.’

“We only knew each other casually. ‘Why?’

“‘I was riding my bike last night with my headphones on, and I was listening to an interview with Michael Schiavo’s ex-girlfriend. Did you hear the interview?’

“‘No. You mean Cindi Shook?’

“‘I think that’s her name. You might want to listen to what she said. She said some pretty mean things about Michael.’

“Wow! We’d been trying to locate Cindi, but she’d broken up with Michael years ago, and we didn’t know how to find her. She no longer had her job as a nurse at the hospital where Michael later got a job.

“Dad had finished his interview. I brought Tim over. ‘It may be in your best interests to locate this girl,’ he told Dad after he’d repeated his story.

“‘Maybe we should tell this to Joe Magri,’ Dad said. ‘Run it by him and see what he has to say.’

“Lawyers are funny. Some things you tell them that you think are really important, they blow it off. But when I called Joe, I thought he was going to come right through the phone. ‘You need to find that girl and find out exactly what she said,’ he shouted.
‘Now!’
Over the years, the courts had believed that Michael was the ‘good guy.’ If we had a witness who refuted his story that Terri had expressed a wish to die, surely they would hear our case with more sympathy.

“I called the station. The DJ who interviewed Cindi was a woman named Carrie Kirkland, and she confirmed everything Tim had told me. Yes, the woman was Cindi Shook. Yes, Ms. Shook had said Michael was not the type of person everybody thought he was. He was abusive. He had a violent temper. He had stalked her after they broke up, years ago. He once tried to drive her off the road. Amazing stuff! She was afraid of him even now, she said, all these years later. She was now married with young children and didn’t want to jeopardize them. She was only moved to call the station because she had heard Michael bad-mouthing our family on a local morning show, and she couldn’t let it go. She had to tell listeners what kind of a man he was.”

I had mixed feelings when Bobby reported all this to me. Maybe Magri was right: maybe the information could help Terri. But maybe we would have our hopes raised only to have them dashed again. I was so exhausted that Cindi’s explosive news didn’t excite me the way it excited Bob and Bobby. They had heard the tone of Magri’s voice. Michael was an abuser! A stalker! He might have abused Terri! The judge would have to believe us now!

Bobby again:

“I have a very close friend, Eddie Cotilla, who works for an investigative firm. I got a copy of the Cindi tape and immediately called Eddie and asked him to track Cindi down.

“It wasn’t difficult. Cindi lived in Brandon
²
under her married name, Brasher, and Eddie located her within hours. ‘I called her, but couldn’t get anywhere with her. She was too scared of Michael. So I said, ‘Dad, you call her.’”

Bob did: “I had no more success than Bobby,” he reported. “Cindi repeated her accusations about Michael’s abusiveness, but that was all. ‘I will not go public,’ she said right away. ‘And if you try to subpoena me, I’ll forget everything I just told you.’ Those were her exact words.

“I called Joe Magri and told him everything that Cindi Shook had said. ‘Can we keep her anonymous?’ I asked Joe. ‘Otherwise, she won’t talk.’

“‘Impossible,’ he answered. ‘We’ll do everything we can to protect her, but you’ve got to be honest with her and say her name’s going to come out if it’s used in court.’

“I called Cindi back and pleaded with her to go public with
her statement. ‘You’re a parent now,’ I told her. ‘If it was one of your children . . . What they’re doing to Terri, they’re killing her right now! Please, please come out.’

“She still refused: ‘No. My children. I’m afraid he’ll kill my children.’”

When Bob told me about the call, I was overwhelmed. I knew Michael could become enraged—I had seen plenty of that!—but Cindi’s fear was beyond anything I could have imagined. I sympathized with her, absolutely understood her desire not to testify. But Terri’s life was at stake. She had already gone a day and a half without food. And there was no chance the tube would be reinserted if Cindi didn’t speak out.

Bob called our other lawyer, Pat Anderson, and asked her to help. She and her partner, Jim Eckert, dispatched an investigator, Kim Takacs, to Cindi’s house.

“For some reason, Cindi spoke to her,” Bobby says. “She said a lot of things to Kim that she said to my father and me. And Kim wrote it all down so that it could be used in an affidavit. Pat and Jim took the evidence to Judge Greer and filed for an emergency injunction based on Cindi’s evidence.”

In taking her deposition, Jim Eckert played the audiotape of Cindi’s conversation with the DJ. She was describing the time when her feelings toward Michael changed:

CINDI:
I’m sort of personal with the case because I was the first girl that Michael Schiavo dated after his wife had this heart attack. It was about three years after she had her heart attack.

DJ:
Right.

CINDI:
And he used to go visit her at the nursing home while we were dating. . . . It was before he ever filed his lawsuit . . . He’s a real loud guy, and he would go through the nursing home. And he said immediately as soon as he got near the door, her head was already looking at the door because she would recognize his voice.

DJ:
Right.

CINDI:
And she would start crying when he got ready to leave. And he was like, “She has ruined years of my life, and she has taken all this time—and obsessed my whole life with this, and this is all her fault”—just a complete change.

DJ:
Really?

CINDI:
. . . I was just like, I don’t even know who you are, but just get away from me and—

DJ:
How long did you date him?

CINDI:
I dated him for a year.

DJ:
I talked to somebody else who knows the family personally . . . and they said there was a little bit of an emotional abusive relationship going on with them. Do you know anything about that?

CINDI:
I don’t know from him, but she was kind of heavy as a child, and—

DJ:
And he would call her fat, and that’s why she was so anorexic and bulimic. Right?

CINDI:
[He said] she was bulimic, and there’s no way somebody could be taking all those laxatives . . . Mike’s very possessive; he’s very jealous. He stalked me at my—at where I worked after I stopped dating.
³
When he would get mad at me he would tell me, “I would rather be with her laying in that bed in the nursing home than you.” I mean, he can be the most incredibly mean person.

DJ:
What a nice guy . . .

During her deposition, Jim Eckert followed up on Cindi’s statement that she was scared when Michael got a job at the hospital.

Q
(Jim Eckert): If you were afraid of him, did you report this to management?

A
(Cindi Shook): Yes.

Q:
And what was the reaction of management?

A:
That unless I had a restraining order there was nothing they could do.

Q:
Did you ever attempt to get a restraining order?

A:
No.

Q:
Did you ever think about getting a restraining order?

A:
Yes.

Q:
When was that?

A:
During that time.

Q:
Was it during the same time he was following you also?

A:
Yes . . .

Q:
Did you ever talk to anybody about getting a restraining order?

A:
Yes . . . An off-duty police officer . . . May have been a deputy sheriff.

Eckert asked her about Terri’s wishes as well:

Q:
Did you ever have a conversation with him about what he and she had discussed about living or dying in the event they had a stroke or automobile accident or anything else like that?

A:
No . . .

Q:
How long were you and he friends?

A:
I think about ten months.

Q:
How often would you see him during that time period?

A:
Every few days; every two or three days.

Q:
What would you do?

A:
We had an anatomy class together. We just hung out a lot at one or the other of our residences and talked.

Q:
So you must have had lots of conversations then. Right?

A:
Yes.

Q:
And did he discuss Terri with you?

A:
Yes . . . He talked about her medical care; he talked about different options of things he could do to make sure she was cared for in the best possible way.

Q:
Did he want her to live?

A:
I don’t know.

Q:
Did he ever say he wanted her to die?

A:
No.

Q:
Did he ever indicate to you that she had indicated that she wanted to die?

A:
No.

And, when Eckert asked her about her statement to Kim Takacs, this:

Q:
Now it goes on to say . . . that Mr. Schiavo became angry when you asked him questions about Terri Schiavo.

A:
Yes . . .

Q:
It goes on to give a quote there, “How the hell should I know—we never spoke about this, my God, I’m only twenty-five years old.” Did you say that? . . .

A:
What he said to me is “How the hell should I know. We were young. We never spoke of this.”

Q:
What was “this”?

A:
What to do with her now. The only conversations I had with him were related to what to do with her now . . . How he could get on with his life . . . He and I had many discussions about the fact that he felt like he wanted to get on with his life, and he talked about the option . . . about building an addition to her parents’ home. He talked about other options . . .

Q:
What were the other options you talked about?

A:
Hire private staff in the nursing home she was in to be there twenty-four hours a day, move her to another nursing home and hire staff to be with her twenty-four hours a day.

Q:
Anything else?

A:
No.

Q:
Was there ever any discussion of conversations he had with her about her wishing to die in the event of an incident such as what happened to her? . . .

A:
No.

Q:
Did he ever indicate to you that she and he had had discussions about wanting not to live in the event of an incident such as what happened to her?

A:
No.

“Terri’s feeding tube had been removed now for over two days,” Bobby went on. “But Judge Greer refused to issue an injunction because it was thirteen months after the original trial started. The statute of limitations, he ruled, said that new evidence had to be submitted within a year.

“So on April 26, Anderson and Eckert made a brilliant move. They filed an action against Michael in civil court, taking it out of the probate division where Greer presided. They went before a new judge, Frank Quesada, who agreed to an emergency hearing that evening.

“All of us were at the house that night, including my ex-girlfriend and my niece, Alexandra, and we were on pins and needles, waiting to hear how Quesada was going to rule.”

The phone rang. Bob picked it up. I couldn’t hear what he was saying—he had his back turned to us—but when he hung up and looked at me, there was an expression on his face I’ve never seen before or since, and now that Terri’s dead will never see again. His eyes shone; he was smiling; his facial muscles worked to control emotions that seemed to want to burst from him. “That was a reporter from the
Tampa Tribune
,” he said. “He just walked out of the courtroom. The hearing’s still going on, but he said”—his voice broke—“he said it looks like Judge Quesada is going to issue an injunction. He’ll call us back.”