Wife and husband planned fatal hospital shooting for weeks

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The plan has been in the making for weeks: Ellen Gilland, 76, will shoot her terminally ill husband, Jerry, 77, and then kill herself. But after shooting him in the head in the hospital room on the 11th floor, she couldn’t handle the others.

Instead, still armed, Gilland was in a four-hour standoff with the police until the police were able to use non-lethal explosives to distract her and take her into custody.

That’s according to a police report on Saturday’s shooting and its aftermath on a floor for terminally ill patients at AdventHealth Daytona Beach near Florida’s central coast.

The couple hatched the plan three weeks ago, Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Yang said at a news conference over the weekend. According to him, during the conversation, they decided that if Jerry Gilland’s unnamed illness got worse, “he wants her to end it.”

“Obviously the goal was for him to do it, but he didn’t have the powers so she had to do it,” Young said.

So they turned to “suicide with murder, in which she would kill herself,” the police chief said. “But she decided she couldn’t go through with it.”

After hearing the shot from room 1106, two hospital workers entered and saw Ellen Gilland sitting next to the bed, her husband unconscious in a pool of blood. According to the police report, she pointed her gun at the couple and told them to leave the room, which smelled of burning gunpowder. Another employee also entered and was ordered to leave at gunpoint.

According to the report, the staff then began to evacuate people from nearby premises. The police chief called it a “logistical nightmare” as most of the patients on the 11th floor were on ventilators.

After the officers arrived, they lined up in the hallway with their guns pointed at the open door of room 1106. The police repeatedly yelled, “Drop your guns!” according to the officer’s body camera video taken about 10 minutes after the shooting.

“Tell me what’s going on. We don’t want to hurt you,” one of the officers called out. Another told a colleague, “Get up. Reserve. We have time. We have nothing but time.”

About four hours later, members of the SWAT team used a non-lethal explosive device to distract Ellen Gilland and entered the room. They tried to use a stun gun, but they failed to immobilize her, and she fired a shot at the ceiling. She then dropped her weapon and was taken into custody, the police said in a statement.

On Monday, Gilland was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of aggressive assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and remained in jail without bail. Her court-appointed public defender did not respond to an email request for comment.

The Gillands’ neighbors also did not return phone messages on Tuesday.

“This is a tragic circumstance,” said the chief of police, “because it simply shows that none of us is immune from the trials and tribulations of life.”

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