The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Mother charged with helping young couple in suicide pact

LANSING, Mich. (AP) - Prosecutors say Kathleen Holey did everything she could to help her son and daughter-in-law commit suicide, including driving them to an abandoned farmhouse, arranging pillows and blankets for their comfort and handing over a powerful narcotic.

The daughter-in-law survived, though, setting off an investigation that led law enforcement authorities to Holey.

Good grief! And somehow it keeps getting more bizarre.

"You can't conceive of wanting to help your child kill themselves," said [prosecutor Charles] Sherman, who filed the assisted suicide charges. "There has to be some reason. I'm just as anxious to know what that reason is myself."

Sherman said Kathleen Holey was resolute in her decision that suicide was the best way out for the teen-agers, who were married last August.

According to prosecutors, she drove the couple to a pharmacy to fill her prescription for fentanyl, a painkiller she used to treat chronic pain from a head injury. She then took them to a McDonald's for their final meal before heading to the abandoned farmhouse where they had chosen to die.

But the capper comes, of course, from the defense attorney:

Kathleen Holey faces up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines if convicted of assisted suicide. She is jailed on $25,000 bail and will undergo a psychiatric evaluation to see if she is competent to stand trial.

Her attorney, Ronald Zawacki, said the woman is shaken by her son's death. He said he was awaiting to see all the evidence before making any further comment. [Emphasis mine.]

This is like the first Menendez trial, where a juror said she couldn't convict because those poor boys would have to live without their mother. Good grief, lady, they killed they mother, and this lady killed her son. Makes you shake your head at the world....