Facts Show Schiavo Was Not Blind

Although millions of Americans watched Terri Schiavo follow people and objects with her eyes as they moved about her hospital room, the doctor who conducted the autopsy reported that she was blind.


In a press conference that raised more questions than it answered, Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin claimed that the "vision centers of her brain were dead," and as a result she could not see. He admitted that although he had no idea what caused Terri's condition, he was unable to find any evidence it was due to trauma.


This in the face of medical reports that showed Terri had suffered bone and other injuries sometime prior to her collapse.


According to Thogmartin's, office, his autopsy showed that Terri had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, but he could not explain what caused her collapse 15 years ago. Moreover, he noted that he had found no proof of the alleged "eating disorder" widely believed to be the cause of her collapse. He also ruled out strangulation.


He also told reporters that Terri did not appear to have suffered a heart attack and there was no evidence that she was given harmful drugs or other substances prior to her death.


Terri, he added, died from dehydration. "Her brain was profoundly atrophied," Thogmartin reported, and added that her brain weighed about half what a healthy human brain weighs. "This damage was irreversible," he said.


He said she would not have been able to eat or drink if she had been given food by mouth as her parents' requested.


"Removal of her feeding tube would have resulted in her death whether she was fed or hydrated by mouth or not," Thogmartin told reporters.


Commenting on the autopsy report, Fr. Frank Pavone, who was with Terri Schiavo in the final hours and moments of her life and has called her death a murder, said: "No details of this autopsy change the moral evaluation of what happened to Terri. Her physical injuries and disabilities never made her less of a person. No amount of brain injury ever justifies denying a person proper humane care. That includes food and water.


"A person with a 'profoundly atrophied' brain needs profound care and love. Terri did not die from an atrophied brain. She died from an atrophy of compassion on the part of her estranged husband and those who helped him to have her deliberately killed."