NEW YORK – For years, New Yorker Vincent Tropeano watched helplessly as multiple sclerosis ate away at the body of his frail wife, Elaine, until it all became too much.
After she became a prisoner in her hospital bed on the first floor of their Brooklyn home, where she suffered the indignity of no longer being able to use the bathroom, he completely snapped Saturday.
"Do you want to go out like this?" a naked Vincent, 74, asked his wife as a nurse changed her, a law-enforcement source said. The nurse, Rose Hall, fled the house under Vincent's orders. She called 911 in tears.
By the time officers arrived at the home, the couple was dead -- Elaine face-up with a gunshot to the head and Vincent on the bedroom floor with a self-inflicted wound, sources said.
Neighbors said the couple had been married at least 35 years, with two grown sons. "She was his whole world," said Nathan Bershadsky, who had known them for 11 years.
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