Thomas Stuart Macaulay is charged in Greene County Common Pleas Court with two counts of assisted suicide.
“Assisted suicide is against the policy of the state of Ohio,” said Greene County Prosecutor David Hayes, who confirmed the charges are in connection to the March 28 death of Macaulay’s wife, 75-year-old Ardis Susanne Macaulay.
She retired as an art teacher from Mechanicsburg High School and previously taught art at Bethel and Tecumseh high schools, according to an obituary published on YSNEWS.com.
Yellow Springs police responded around 3:20 a.m. March 28 to Aspen Court after Thomas Macaulay reported that his wife died, and that it was a nitrogen-induced suicide. He said she chose to end her life, according to a call log.
One of the responding officers reported he found Ardis Macaulay “visibly deceased, laying on a … recliner with an inflated translucent clothing bag over her head connected to an air tank.”
Thomas Macaulay told officers he had been with his wife. He said he did not participate in the suicide but that they had been planning it, according to the police report.
Inside the house officers found a suicide-type note on the table next to the recliner and instructions on how to die by suicide through nitrogen gas poisoning, the report stated.
Ohio Revised Code 3795.04 states that assisted suicide is “providing the physical means by which the other person commits or attempts to commit suicide” or; “participating in a physical act by which the other person commits or attempts to commit suicide.”
Macaulay, a retired Wright State University sculpture professor, is free on his own recognizance and is next scheduled to appear in court Sept. 6 for a pretrial hearing.
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