Word: coffelt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...family affair," Dale Coffelt says, recalling the Saturday that JoAnn McGuckin, 45, pulled up to see him in her aging Chevy Suburban. "She just showed up with all the kids." Well, not all. Six of her eight children were packed in the SUV. But so was the body of her husband Michael, 61, dead that day from the final malnourishing stages of almost a decade of multiple sclerosis...
...Michael had been unemployed since falling ill; no one else made a living; the water pump for their decrepit home near Lake Pend Oreille had broken down. The kids, Sheriff Phil Jarvis believes, subsisted on lake water and "lily-pad soup." But even JoAnn knew to seek out Coffelt on that May 12. After all, he is the county coroner and funeral director. All she did was drop the body off. Coffelt waited nearly two more weeks before he got the widow to commit to any kind of burial arrangement. He wasn't allowed to go by the house...
...however, communicate to those six children the need to keep the world at bay. When the authorities took her away last Tuesday, four days after Coffelt got her to bury her husband, the kids went to battle stations. A police deputy drove up to take the children into protective custody. "Where's Mother?" asked Benjamin McGuckin, 14. The officer said she was in a hospital with chest pains and he was there to take them to see her. The boy refused to believe him and, according to Sheriff Jarvis, ran into the house yelling "Get the guns!" The kids...