Satenig fled the Armenian death march, finding refuge with relatives in Paris, and eventually reuniting with her brother in Pontiac.
Levon and Satenig met through the Armenian community in their city, where they married and began their family. The couple welcomed a daughter, Margaret, in , followed by son Murad -- who later earned the nickname "Jack" by American friends and teachers -- and, finally, third child Flora.
After Levon lost his job at the foundry in the early s, he began making a sizeable living as the owner of his own excavating company -- a difficult feat in Depression-era America.
While other families suffered financially, the Kevorkians began living a more comfortable life in a bucolic, multi-cultural suburb in Pontiac. Levon and Satenig were strict and religious parents, who worked hard to make sure their children were obedient Christians. Jack, however, had trouble reconciling what he believed were conflicting religious ideas.
His family regularly attended church, and Jack often railed against the idea of miracles and an all-knowing God in his weekly Sunday school class. If there were a God who could make his son walk on water, Kevorkian insisted, he would also have been able to prevent the Turkish slaughter of his entire extended family. Jack debated the idea of God's existence every week until he realized he would not find an acceptable explanation to his questions, and stopped attending church entirely by the age of The children were also encouraged to perform well in school, and all three demonstrated high academic intelligence -- as the only boy, however, Jack became the focus of Levon and Satenig's high expectations.
Jack rose to the occasion easily; even as a young boy, Kevorkian was a voracious reader and academic who loved the arts, including drawing, painting and piano. But along with Jack's academic prowess came a highly critical mind, and he rarely accepted ideas at face value. He engaged in frequent arguments with his teachers at school, sometimes humiliating them when they couldn't keep up with his sharp debate skills.
While his jabs at teachers earned admiration from his classmates, learning came so effortlessly to Jack that it often alienated him from his peers. Kevorkian was promoted to Eastern Junior High School when he was in the sixth grade, and by the time he was in high school he had taught himself German and Japanese. Classmates soon labeled him as an eccentric bookworm, and Kevorkian had trouble making friends as a result. He also gave up the idea of romantic relationships, believing them to be an unnecessary diversion from his studies.
In , when Kevorkian was only 17, he graduated with honors from Pontiac High School. Accepted into the University of Michigan College of Engineering, Kevorkian had aims to become a civil engineer.
Halfway through his freshman year, however, he became bored with his studies and began focusing on botany and biology. By midyear, he had set his sights on medical school, often taking 20 credit hours in a semester in order to meet the hour medical school requirement. He graduated in medicine at the University of Michigan in and began a specialty in pathology soon after. In , however, the Korean War abruptly halted Kevorkian's career. He served 15 months as an Army medical officer in Korea, then finished his service in Colorado.
While serving his residency at the University of Michigan hospital in the s, Kevorkian became fascinated by death and the act of dying. He made regular visits to terminally ill patients, photographing their eyes in an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment of death. Kevorkian believed that doctors could use the information to distinguish death from fainting, shock or coma in order to learn when resuscitation was useless.
Not one to avoid distasteful ideas, Kevorkian again caused a stir with colleagues by proposing that death-row prison inmates be used as the subjects of medical experiments while they were still alive. Inspired by research that described medical experiments the ancient Greeks conducted on Egyptian criminals, Kevorkian formulated the idea that similar modern experiments could not only save valuable research dollars, but also provide a glimpse into the anatomy of the criminal mind.
In , he advocated his view in a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a method he called "terminal human experimentation", he argued that condemned convicts could provide a service to humanity before their execution by volunteering for "painless" medical experiments that would begin while they were conscious, but would end in fatality.
For his unorthodox experiments and strange proposals, Jack Kevorkian's peers gave him the nickname "Dr. Kevorkian's controversial views earned him minor media attention which ultimately resulted in his ejection from the University of Michigan Medical Center. He continued his internship at Pontiac General Hospital instead, where he began another set of controversial experiments. After hearing about a Russian medical team who was transfusing blood from corpses into living patients, Kevorkian enlisted the help of medical technologist Neal Nicol to simulate these same experiments.
The results were highly successful, and Kevorkian believed the procedure could help save lives on the battlefield -- if blood from a bank was unavailable, doctors might use Kevorkian's research to transfuse the blood of a corpse into an injured soldier.
Kevorkian pitched his idea to the Pentagon, figuring it could be used in Vietnam, but the doctor was denied a federal grant to continue his research.
Instead, the research fueled his reputation as an outsider, scared his colleagues and eventually infected Kevorkian with Hepatitis C.
After qualifying as a specialist in , Kevorkian bounced around the country from hospital to hospital, publishing more than 30 professional journal articles and booklets about his philosophy on death, before setting up his own clinic near Detroit, Michigan. The business ultimately failed, and Kevorkian headed to California to commute between two part-time pathology jobs in Long Beach. These jobs also ended quickly when Kevorkian quit in another dispute with a chief pathologist; Jack claimed that his career was doomed by physicians who feared his radical ideas.
Kevorkian "retired" to devote his time to a film project about Handel's Messiah as well as research for his reinvigorated death-row campaign. By , however, Kevorkian was still jobless and had also lost his fiancee; he broke off the relationship after finding his bride-to-be lacking in self-discipline. By , Kevorkian was living alone, occasionally sleeping in his car, living off of canned food and social security.
In , he returned to Michigan to write a comprehensive history of experiments on executed humans which was published in the obscure Journal of the National Medical Association after more prestigious journals rejected it.
In , Kevorkian discovered a way to expand his death row proposal when he learned that doctors in the Netherlands were helping people die by lethal injection. His new crusade for assisted suicide, or euthanasia, became an extension of his campaign for medical experiments on the dying. Kevorkian began writing new articles, this time about the benefits of euthanasia. The Thanatron consisted of three bottles that delivered successive doses of fluids: first a saline solution, followed by a painkiller and, finally, a fatal dose of the poison potassium chloride.
Using Kevorkian's design, patients who were ill could even administer the lethal dose of poison themselves. After years of rejection from national medical journals and media outlets, Kevorkian would finally become the focus of national attention for his machine and his proposal to set up a franchise of "obitoriums," where doctors could help the terminally ill end their lives.
But Kevorkian would become infamous in , when he assisted in the suicide of Janet Adkins, a year-old Alzheimer's patient from Michigan. Adkins was a member of the Hemlock Society -- an organization that advocates voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill patients -- before she became ill. After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Adkins began searching for someone to end her life before the degenerative disease took full effect.
She had heard through the media about Kevorkian's invention of a "suicide machine," and contacted Kevorkian about using the invention on her. Kevorkian agreed to assist her in a public park, inside his Volkswagen van. Kevorkian attached the IV, and Adkins administered her own painkiller and then the poison.
Within five minutes, Adkins died of heart failure. He said Kevorkian sent those people topsychiatrists and added that his client had talked severalpeople who were not terminally ill out of suicide.
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