Ellen W. Gilland appearing in court on Friday (image via Twitter screenshot)
The elderly Florida woman accused of killing her husband in an apparent murder-suicide pact has been indicted on four criminal counts.
Ellen Gilland, 76, allegedly shot and killed her husband, Jerry Gilland, 77, in a Daytona Beach hospital on Jan. 21. According to police, the couple had planned weeks earlier for Jerry — facing a terminal illness — would be the one to carry out the shooting, but his condition deteriorated and he became too frail.
Ellen Gilland allegedly shot her husband at around 11:30 a.m. as he lay in his hospital bed. During the police standoff that followed, her gun apparently discharged a second time, the bullet striking a ceiling panel above where the SWAT team was standing.
The indictment charges Gilland with a first-degree felony charge of assisting in self-murder/manslaughter, two third-degree felony charges of aggravated assault with a firearm, and a second-degree felony charge of aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer with a firearm.
Gilland, the indictment says, “did deliberately assist another, JERRY GILLAND, in the commission of self-murder, and/or did then and there unlawfully and by her own act, procurement or culpable negligence, kill JERRY GILLAND by shooting him with a firearm, without lawful justification and under circumstances not constituting excusable homicide or murder[.]”
Gilland also assaulted several police officers, the indictment says, creating a “well-founded fear” in the officers that “violence was imminent” before allegedly firing at them.
In Florida, a first-degree felony is punishable by up to 30 years in prison, and third degree felonies are punishable by up to five years. Aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer with a firearm has a three-year mandatory minimum sentence.
Gilland was taken into custody and denied bond after a Florida judge found that Ellen Gilland’s actions amounted to “premeditated murder” and that several other lives were endangered by her actions that day. A detective who testified at that bond hearing said that Jerry Gilland was the one who loaded the gun and that although Ellen Gilland pulled the trigger, Jerry Gilland had held his wife’s wrist as she put the gun to his head because he did not have the dexterity to do it himself.
Only 10 U.S. states have have Death With Dignity, Right to Die or End of Life Options laws on the books, and Florida isn’t one of them, despite a push by the state’s considerable elderly population to liberalize those laws, The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
The article notes that Florida State Code 765.309 reads: “Nothing construed to condone, authorize, or approve mercy killing or euthanasia or to permit any affirmative or deliberate act or omission to end life other than to permit the natural process of dying.”
Read the indictment, below.
Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
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