Arrested for assisting her mom’s suicide, U.S. woman faces bleak future

In Alberta, Canada, today, Linda McNall, 53, will probably be escorted to the airport and put on a plane to Arizona, where she no longer has a home. There’s a pretty good chance she’ll kill herself because that’s why she’s being thrown out of the country; she tried to kill herself.

McNall and her mother, who had colon cancer, drove to Alberta to take their lives in “the most beautiful place on earth,” CBC News reports.

But something went wrong — or right, depending on your position on assisted suicide — and McNall survived. She was arrested at the hospital and has pleaded guilty to the rarely-used charge of assisting a suicide. She’s tried to kill herself twice since.

“I can’t imagine a more bleak result than her being in a homeless shelter without medical care and without psychiatric care, without medication or insurance,” her lawyer says of her likely fate in Arizona. The woman has no money and no medical insurance.

“My mom’s dead and my sister’s in jail … I have a lot of hard feelings for the whole way this situation occurred,” her son told a Regina newspaper last month.

He said both were sick and had mounting medical bills of over $50,000. “I knew they were having problems and things like that. I didn’t know that they were going to take these drastic actions,” he said.