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She deserved so much better.
By Dan O'Reilly — Written on May 03, 2022
Emergency medical workers entered a Louisiana home on January 3, 2022, after a 911 call about a 36-year-old woman who had stopped breathing.
What the first responders encountered in the otherwise innocuous home would be the stuff of nightmares.
Lacey Fletcher, a disabled woman was found dead, fused to her couch, under her parents’ watch.
What happened to Lacey Fletcher that caused her parents to be indicted on murder charges:
When first responders entered the home that Lacey Fletcher shared with her parents, they were shocked to find that Fletcher was sitting in a pile of feces and urine and had seemingly fused to the couch that she was sitting on.
While paramedics declared that she had died at the scene, further investigation would lead the coroner, Dr. Ewell Bickham to determine that she might have died 24 to 48 hours earlier.
Fletcher suffered from locked-in syndrome, which caused her to become unable to control any of her muscles besides the ones that controlled her eyes.
Her parents were, ostensibly, her caretakers and have been indicted on a charge of second-degree murder. Fletcher weighed in at only 96 pounds when her body was discovered.
A coroner has revealed appalling details about Lacey Fletcher's final months.
After Fletcher was discovered, Dr. Bickham was brought in and he described the experience, saying, “When I first walked in the house, it smelled of feces, fecal material, however you want to put that politely, it stunk, and when I got to the body, the individual was basically sitting in a hole, filled with liquid stool and urine.”
The scene was so horrid that even the coroner, a person whose job it is to look and deal with dead bodies, was severely affected by the state that he found Fletcher in, “I couldn't eat for a week, and I cried for a week.”
It is believed that Fletcher might have been left, rotting away while still alive in the same place on that couch for years.
According to her parents, the paralyzed woman hadn’t seen a doctor in a decade, in spite of her deteriorating condition.
Lacey Fletcher’s parents are now being accused of negligence.
The parents were interviewed by police after the death of their daughter and they said that they didn’t bring her to the doctor because she did not want to go.
In spite of bedsores that went all the way down to the bone, they also claimed that they took care of her, including feeding Fletcher and cleaning her wounds.
While the parents may be defending their behavior and might be grieving the loss of their daughter, the words of Dr. Bickham paint a very different and cruel picture, “It's the worst form of medical neglect I've ever seen. I don't know any other adjectives or adverbs to add to that.”
Dan O'Reilly is a writer who covers news, politics, and social justice. Follow him on Twitter.