Prosecutor: Case of man who allegedly shot sick wife tugs at heartstrings

A judge has released a Bothell man accused of fatally
shooting his wife in their home after he told detectives
the woman was terminally ill and had asked him to kill
her.

While some are defending 54-year-old Donald McNeely and
vouch that his wife had been suffering untreatable brain
cancer, others say the law is the law and he committed
murder.

“I have great sympathy for this person, but I also recognize we passed an assisted suicide law in this state, one that I’m against, personally,” said Dori. “There is that danger of the slippery slope if we’re driven solely by compassion, I would imagine.”

Snohomish County Prosecutor Mark Roe agrees with Dori that the story definitely “tugs at your heartstrings.”

“Everybody can relate to it.” Roe says his father
recently passed away and he thinks about ‘what if this was happening to us?’

The case is a complicated one and Roe says he’s looking at every detail.

“We’re not required to charge anybody. We have very broad
discretion in Washington. We wait to get as much
information as we can possibly get before we make an
important decision because I think it’s just smart
to do that.”

Are you able to, purely because of passion, ignore what
is clearly a crime, asks Dori.

“Yes, prosecutors have broad discretion to charge or not
charge a case and we use it,” says Roe. “We don’t have to
charge someone.”

The prosecutor says he once had enough evidence to charge
a father for sexually abusing his daughter and he believed he could prove it, but had confirmation from her doctors that the girl was a “very brittle juvenile diabetic” and that the stress of a trial would cause her to slip into a coma and die.

“I didn’t charge the guy then. I waited until she’d gone
through puberty when she wasn’t facing the same sort of
threat,” says Roe.

It wasn’t a long wait and Roe says they kept a close eye
on the man.

A judge, prosecutors, and police all agreed that McNeely
was not a flight risk or a threat to himself or others. He was released without bail on Friday.

The couple’s daughter told detectives that several months
ago she overheard her mother make the request to die but
she told her father not to do it.

Police say McNeely called 911 on Wednesday to report he’d
shot his wife. Officers found the 52-year-old woman’s body and arrested the McNeely.

Roe says he’s aware of the statements from neighbors and
friends of McNeely and he’s received passionate emails
about the situation, but in the end, Roe says they must
consider all the facts and remove any personal emotion
from the case.

“One thing you want to find out is if the investigation
corroborates the claims that the person is making, what
kind of evidence there is from other witnesses, medically. All those sorts of things you weight until you’ve got that kind of information.”