Report: State Tried Schiavo Grab
Police Stopped State Agents From Removing Her From Florida Hospice
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Play CBS Video Video Good Friday Deathwatch Demonstrators continued their efforts in Florida to prolong Terri Schiavo's life. Her relatives are soldiering on with their court battles, Mark Strassmann reports.
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Video Judicial Murder? What if the courts would have ruled in favor of Schiavo's parents? Bob Schieffer talks with CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen, who says the legal world would have been turned upside down.
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Video Focus On Living Wills As many as two-thirds of healthy adult Americans do not have living wills. Sharyn Alfonsi reports on how you can keep what happened to Terri Schiavo from happening to you.
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Terri Schiavo's father Bob Schindler and her sister Suzanne Vitadamo are held up by Pinellas Park police to let traffic cross after leaving the Woodside Hospice on Saturday. (AP)
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Demonstrator Donna Kuntz of Lutz, Fla., prays for Terri Schiavo outside the hospice where the brain-damaged woman has been without nutrients or hydration for eight days. (AP)
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Interactive Life And Death Battle Terri Schiavo's husband and parents clash over keeping the brain-damaged woman alive.
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Interactive Dying Wishes Learn about living wills and other steps to protect your end-of-life decisions.
Alerted by the Bush administration that Schiavo might be on her way to their facility, officials at Morton Plant Hospital went to court Wednesday, asking Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, who ordered the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube last week, what to do.
"It's an extraordinary situation," said Beth Hardy, a hospital spokeswoman. "I don't think any of us has seen anything like it. Ever."
Greer signed an order Wednesday afternoon forbidding the department from "taking possession of Theresa Marie Schiavo or removing her" from the hospice. He directed "each and every and singular sheriff of the state of Florida" to enforce his order.
But at 8:15 a.m. Thursday, DCF lawyers appealed Greer's order to judges at the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Lakeland.
That created the window of time to seize Schiavo. When DCF filed its appeal, it effectively froze the judge's Wednesday order. It took nearly three hours before the judge found out and canceled the automatic stay, shortly before 11 a.m.
Administrators of the 72-bed hospice, who have endured a withering siege of their facility by protesters since Greer ordered Schiavo's feeding tube be removed March 18, declined to discuss Thursday morning's events in any detail.
"I don't really know, or pretend to know, the specifics of what is going on behind the scenes," said Mike Bell, a spokesman for Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, which operates Woodside.
According to sources, DCF intended to take Schiavo to Morton Plant Hospital, where her feeding tube had been reinserted in 2003 following a previous judicial order allowing its removal. But hospice officials were aware that the hospital wasn't likely to perform surgery to reinsert the tube without an order from Greer.
By Carol Marbin Miller
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