By Canadian Press

Man upset by wife’s illness kills them both at hospital

Aug 8, 2018 | 8:30 AM

VALHALLA, N.Y. — A man who said he wanted to end his ailing wife’s suffering shot her to death in her bed at a suburban New York hospital Wednesday and then killed himself, police said.

Richard DeLucia, 71, left a note at the couple’s condo indicating he was distraught about how his wife, Ann, 70, was suffering and wanted to put a stop to her ordeal, Westchester County police spokesman Kieran O’Leary said.

Then the husband went to his wife’s room at Westchester Medical Center with a licensed .38-calibre revolver, fired a single shot that killed his wife and then took his own life with another shot, police said. No one else was in the room at the time, authorities said.

Ann DeLucia, whose medical condition wasn’t immediately revealed, was found in her bed and her husband was found on the floor of her fourth-floor room at the Valhalla hospital, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, police said.

Richard DeLucia had once owned a well-known Westchester catering hall, the Westchester Manor, called the Manor House during his time, current co-owner Enrico Mareschi said. Although DeLucia sold the venue to another owner roughly 15 years ago, he still came by occasionally until two to three years ago, Mareschi said.

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“He was a nice guy,” Mareschi said. “He really was a good person.”

At the couple’s condo building in Yorktown Heights, neighbours absorbed the news with dismay.

“Everybody’s just shocked,” resident Valeria Tassone said, adding that she had no insight into what was going on in the couple’s life.

The gunfire prompted a brief lockdown of a major suburban medical centre that cares for tens of thousands of people per year. Jatziri Escobar, a patient who arrived at the hospital shortly after 9 a.m., told The Journal News she was in a first-floor room when staffers ran through the building, alerting patients about the active shooting.

“I was kinda scared, but one of the officers told me to relax and all would be OK,” said Escobar, 22, of Elmsford.

Dr. Srihari Naidu, an interventional cardiologist at the hospital, told The Associated Press he was at his office in a nearby building when he got an “active shooter alert,” followed by a lockdown notification that lasted for about a half-hour.

The building where the shooting happened is “very well guarded,” he said, and many areas cannot be accessed without badges.

A third-party company handles security for Westchester Medical Center, providing both unarmed guards and some armed supervisors with law-enforcement backgrounds. People entering the hospital aren’t searched for weapons.

Police said the hospital’s security staff responded immediately, and police arrived within two minutes.

Visitor Linda Pepitone said she was trying to get on an elevator, aiming to seek out some salt and pepper for her egg breakfast, when she realized the elevator didn’t seem to be running. A hospital employee came by and told her there was an alert about someone with a weapon.

The fourth-floor area around the site of the shooting remained sealed off afterward, Gleason said, but other aspects of the hospital got back to normal.

Hope Conley said she and her mother-in-law came to visit her hospitalized father-in-law right around the time of the shooting and were told they had to wait. After about a half-hour, they were allowed up to his fourth-floor room, which wasn’t in the closed-off area, she said.

They found the door to his room had been closed for safety, she said.

“They just made sure the patients were secured — they shut all the doors. They did what they had to do,” said Conley, of New Windsor, New York. She said hospital staffers quickly resumed their work: Her father-in-law went into surgery around 10:30 a.m.

The hospital totals over 600 adult, pediatric and psychiatric beds in a campus in northern Westchester.

A study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine counted 154 shootings at hospitals in the U.S. from 2000 through 2011.

In June 2017, a doctor who had been forced to resign from Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York City two years earlier amid a sexual harassment claim opened fire inside the hospital, killing a doctor and hurting six others, authorities said. Police said the doctor, Henry Bello, killed himself at the scene.

Hospitals have since been beefing up security.

Two hospitals on Long Island recently started arming their security guards. Another now requires visitors to show identification and obtain a hospital-issued guest pass before passing through security turnstiles.

Other New York-area hospitals have been hiring police officers to provide security.

Westchester Medical Center spokeswoman Kara Bennorth declined to discuss whether any security changes might be made in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting.

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Peltz reported from New York. Associated Press writers Kiley Armstrong and Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to identify the month of the 2017 shooting at Bronx Lebanon Hospital to June, not July.

Deepti Hajela And Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press