Tampabay: Schiavo fights delay in his wife's case

Michael Schiavo is asking the 2nd District Court of Appeal to let him remove his wife's feeding tube Tuesday instead of Oct. 9, the new date set by a Pinellas judge last week.

Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer's decision to delay the deadline until October gives Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, more time to fight to keep their son-in-law from discontinuing her life support. They filed a motion opposing Schiavo's request.

Mrs. Schiavo collapsed from a heart attack in her St. Petersburg home on Feb. 25, 1990, and was deprived of oxygen for five minutes. She has spent more than a decade in what some doctors describe as a persistent vegetative state.

Doctors that have examined Mrs. Schiavo say that she is unaware of what is happening around her and that her motions and sounds are based on reflex only. But the Schindlers dispute that, saying that she turns her head toward her mother and laughs at jokes.

The Schindlers and Schiavo have accused each other of trying to control Mrs. Schiavo's fate to get $700,000 she received from a 1992 malpractice suit.

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