Police: Double suicide in Ma’aleh Adumim due to wife’s terminal illness

Around 9 a.m. on Thursday morning, police received a call from the couple’s son, who told them he found his parents badly wounded and lying motionless on the floor of their apartment.

By BEN HARTMAN
Updated: MAY 1, 2016 01:04
A terminal illness and years of suffering is believed to have driven a middle-aged couple in Ma’aleh Adumim to take their own lives last week, Judea and Samaria district police say.
Around 9 a.m. on Thursday morning, police received a call from the couple’s son, who told them he found his parents badly wounded and lying motionless on the floor of their apartment.
Both of the deceased had gunshot wounds to the upper body, police said. They were a law-abiding couple and had no history of domestic violence or police complaints, a spokesman for the district said, adding that police believe the couple decided together to commit suicide due to the wife’s terminal illness.
Magen David Adom paramedic Dani Richter said they found a couple in their 60s lying on the floor “with very severe wounds to their upper bodies. We tried to help them but had to pronounce them dead at the scene.”
Outside the apartment building on Thursday, a friend of the couple, Yehezkel Meshiach, said that a month ago he spoke to the husband and that “he sounded desperate, because of his wife’s condition.”
Sari Mashiach, another friend of the family, said that the couple were exemplary, loving parents to their children, but that “for the past two years he [the husband] has been living this hell of caring for her, and probably at some point they got to where they said, ‘Enough!’”