Dr. Death has finally met the real Grim Reaper.
Jack Kevorkian, who earned his ghoulish nickname by helping more than 100 ailing people commit suicide, died yesterday after battling cancer and heart problems. He was 83.
The Michigan pathologist became the world’s best-known advocate for euthanasia in 1990, when he helped an ailing Alzheimer’s patient kill herself by constructing a makeshift suicide machine that allowed her to self-administer a deadly dose of drugs.
The hollow-eyed, pale-faced medic would go on to help scores of other ill people end their lives. In the process, he became a lightning rod for the debate over how people should be allowed to die.
While prosecutors saw him as a self-promoting merchant of death, others saw him as a noble fighter for the right of the terminally ill to die on their own terms.
“Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a rare human being,” said his longtime attorney, Geoffrey Fieger. “It’s a rare human being who can single-handedly take on an entire society by the scruff of its neck and force it to focus on the suffering of other human beings.”
Kevorkian, who admitted in a 2010 interview that he was nervous about his own death, ended his days fighting for life at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich. He had been hospitalized for two weeks with kidney and heart problems.
After Kevorkian’s first assisted suicide, he was charged with first-degree murder but beat the rap.
The unfazed Kevorkian would continue to help people kill themselves, dodging conviction three more times.
Finally in 1999, after he was captured by news cameras giving lethal drugs to a 52-year-old man with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he was convicted of second-degree murder. He served eight years before being released due to health problems.