Doug Elliott had a few beers Thursday morning and headed to Orange for an appointment with his therapist. His wife recalls him laughing and joking, and his almost annoying singing along with the car radio.
In the next hour, though, his mood changed. The smiles and laughter were replaced by sadness, anger and hurt.
He stabbed himself with an ice pick, she said, and when that didn't relieve his pain, he charged the deputy sheriff that had come to help him.
"I don't know what Doug said to the cop," Kimberly Elliott said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I know Doug rushed him, and I saw the deputy go for his gun."
Kim Elliott ran back into the doctor's office and was there when she heard the gunfire. When she went back outside, her husband had been shot three times and was dead in the parking lot. She found his body face down on a red van.
"The deputy was gasping for air and the medical staff in the building came out and did everything they could to save him," she said. "I could see the pain in his face and the tears in his eyes.
"I don't blame the officer," she continued. "He did what he had to do."
She called her husband's death suicide-by-police--a phenomenon in which a person creates a situation in which an officer is forced to kill them.
"Doug wanted out," she said. "He was done."
According to the Virginia State Police, Orange County Deputy Thomas "Moose" Mallory confronted the 32-year-old Elliott Thursday when he responded to an 11:20 a.m. call about a problem outside the offices of Orange Family Physicians on U.S. 15.
State police, who are investigating the shooting, say Mallory was wounded with an "ice pick-type weapon" before fatally wounding the Locust Grove man.
Sources in the Orange County Sheriff's Office said Mallory was stabbed in the head and shoulder. He was treated at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville Thursday and released. He is expected back at work Monday.
Three years ago, according to his wife, Doug Elliott smashed three vertebrae in his back after falling off a roof while building a house. The injury left him unable to work and enmeshed in a workmen's compensation wrangle complete with doctors, nurses, case managers and lawyers.
He took lots of drugs for his pain, she said, to the point where she had no doubt he was addicted.
"But all the doctors turned their backs on him," she said. "The system did him wrong."
She said Elliott had been successfully weaned off Percocet and Valium. Then a month ago, the narcotic time-release painkiller OxyContin was taken away cold turkey, with no warning.
Doug Elliott was left with two anti-depressant drugs, a sleep aid and a muscle relaxer, but nothing for pain, she said.
On Nov. 13, in the throes of drug withdrawal complete with vomiting, diarrhea and the sweats, he went to the emergency room at Culpeper Memorial Hospital. He was given a shot of morphine and a bottle of pain pills, his wife said.
Elliott begged doctors to admit him to the hospital.
"He told the doctors that he wanted to be numbed from the neck down," his wife said. "He was so sick.
"His back had spasms constantly. He couldn't sleep for days. But nobody would listen."
Kim Elliott said her husband had been seeing a psychologist for the last two years, and seemed happy as they drove to an appointment Thursday. But when he got there, his mood suddenly changed.
Kim Elliott saw her husband take an ice pick out of the car. When she asked him about it, he told her not to worry, he wasn't going to hurt himself. "I promise," she remembers him saying.
In the doctor's office, his anger rose. His eyes welled with tears and he raged that "everybody had turned on him and that nobody cared that he lived in pain 24 hours a day, seven days a week," she said.
She asked the doctor to take the ice pick away from her husband, she said, but Elliott wouldn't give it up. He stabbed himself in the chest, after which both the doctor and her husband asked her to leave the office, she said.
The psychologist told her later that Doug Elliott asked him to call authorities. The three of them waited in the parking lot for the arrival of Deputy Mallory.
When Mallory arrived, she watched her husband charge Mallory, saw him stab the deputy twice in the head, saw the officer reach for his gun.
She didn't see the shooting, but was not surprised.
"I knew Doug was going all the way. If they weren't going to fix the problem, he was going to end the problem," Kim Elliott said.
"I don't blame the officer," she repeated. "He did what he had to do."
To reach ROBIN KNEPPER: rknepper@earthlink.net