Horror Story

Men in the Manhattan millinery trade have known Louis Greenfield, a Hungarian Jew who fought for the U. S. in the War and has a little business in West 38th Street, as an honest, hard-working chap almost too devoted to his wife, Anna, and the son she bore him in 1922. They knew he borrowed money right & left to get nurses, doctors, treatments for the son, Jerry, who was forever ailing. They knew that worry aged Louis Greenfield prematurely. But only his intimates knew that the child, who would have been 17 last March, was a quivering, overgrown, cross-eyed imbecile, a victim of the rare, incurable Lawrence-Biedl disease.

Last January his friends were shocked to hear of Louis Greenfield's arrest for manslaughter. He had called in police and showed them how he chloroformed Jerry, now grown to a 17O-lb. six-footer. He explained that he had done it to put the boy out of misery and, as a final horror, because a doctor had warned him that the imbecile boy, whose body was grown and whose mental age was two, might attack his own mother.

Last week a jury, all but one of whom were parents, tried Louis Greenfield. Lawyer Samuel Leibowitz staged the defense, free of charge, but his renowned theatrical talents were scarcely needed. Euthanasia defendants are seldom convicted. Father Greenfield's story made the jurors sob. He said:

"We bought carriage after carriage for him . . . but . . . he just couldn't sit up. [Father Greenfield demonstrated how the child's head flopped to & fro on its neck.] I bought babies' toys for him but when I held them out he couldn't grasp them. He lay there like a--like a lump of pudding." Jerry grew large rapidly, too rapidly. He never learned to walk alone, could only lurch, spin and sprawl. Almost nothing coordinated. He had to be helped with the simplest functions. When he was put in institutions, he pined for his family. He was subject to fits. Caring for him ceaselessly at home exhausted the parents' health as well as their money.

Under Lawyer Leibowitz's guidance, Louis Greenfield told of dreams he began having which "seemed to tell me, 'If you love Jerry ... let him slip away peacefully in his sleep . . . and he won't be tormented and looked at and yelled at and tortured by doctors." After one fitful, dream-racked night, Greenfield sent his wife to the shop, did the deed.

Leibowitz: "Are you sorry the boy is dead?"

Greenfield: "For Jerry's sake, no. But for my sake, I am sorry. I miss him."

Leibowitz: "You knew it was against the law?"

Greenfield: "It was against the law of man, but not against the law of God."

Leibowitz: "Why do you say that?"

Greenfield: "Because God urged me to kill him."

After four hours' deliberation, the jury acquitted Louis Greenfield. He and his wife talked of adopting another son, apparently unaware that adoption agencies might refuse to permit it.

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