ELDORADO—We just got a new report on Linda Young, the wife of the man accused of solicitation to commit murder for hire, Roger Young, of Eldorado.
This new report differs from the one we got last night, which differs from what we learned Saturday….so we’re not sure what exactly is going on.
However, we figured we’d better address it here, as it seems to be an ever-changing situation, and if it differs from what’s on the front page of the new issue, we want to make sure everything is clarified.
What we heard Saturday about Mrs. Young’s alleged suicide attempt is this: Mrs. Young didn’t show up to pick up her paycheck at Ferrell Hospital Friday morning. No one thought anything of it until she didn’t show up by afternoon. Then some of her friends and/or family decided to go out to her rural home and see if she were okay. After all, the husband had allegedly attempted to get not one, but two people (albeit two different people, at two different times) to bring about Linda’s death, just a week before. They wanted to make sure she’d come to no harm.
They went through the house and didn’t find anyone, and were just about to leave the premises when someone looked inside an extended-cab truck and saw Linda’s purse. When they looked a little closer, they saw what they thought was Linda in the back seat. Therewas blood on her arms.
They were able to get in to get her, and ultimately she was flown by helicopter to Deaconess in Evansville. Now…here’s where the reports diverge. Our sources told us Saturday that they’d determined that she’d cut her arms, but that wasn’t necessarily what did it….she’d ingested a considerable amount of pharmaceuticals (we have NOT been advised what they were) and apparently her brain was overwhelmed. By Friday night, she was on life support….but there was no brain activity. The family was called, and they made the decision to remove her from the ventilator. They did, but she was then breathing on her own. Although there was no discernible brain activity, the family was encouraged, and our sources were told that they considered her condition to be “improving” at that point, which is what we went with in print, because we had to have the print version wrapped up LAST NIGHT for print today.
Now, we’ve just learned that the rest of Linda Young’s life-support is being removed as of today, because she hasn’t improved like they believed she was going to. There still remains no brain activity. So our article is obsolete before it even hits the stands. Good thing we have the website.
We can’t tell you how much this whole story bothers us.
There were rumors going around over the weekend that one of the people who Roger Young had talked to about killing his wife had gone through with it. Our sources tell us that’s patently ridiculous…yet those rumors persisted. It’s just such an overwhelming thing to consider, thinking about committing a crime such as what Young’s accused of. And unfortunately, it happens fairly frequently—both “considering committing” it, and actually following through with it. Bigwigs do it frequently. That’s why sometimes, in some of these little podunk counties, the bigwigs really put their money and effort behind their coroner candidate. It’s the coroner who’s a stopgap between the medical people and the law enforcement people. The coroner pronounces a person dead….and is the one who seeks further investigation if he believes the death to be “suspicious.” And believe me when I tell you: there are people right now in Southern Illinois who are jockeying for “their” guy to get in as coroner…and for their own reasons….and those reasons may be for this very kind of thing: if there’s an “accident,” “their” coroner can DECLARE it’s an “accident”…and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it.
That was a tangent. Of sorts. Back to the subject at hand: Linda Young. Ang talked to a family spokesperson last week. The family seemed to be holding up well. The one Ang spoke to, she said, was a delightful person who was keeping the faith. We were really hopeful that things were going to get straightened out for the Youngs. This is just a tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this horrible time….and we’re sorry the latest we got for the print version isn’t the latest we have now, so please forgive us.