Courageous or Criminal? a Texas Father Pulled a Gun in the ICU to Stop Doctors from Taking His Son Off Life Support

Doctors said George Pickering III was brain dead and started withdrawing life support. During the standoff his father forced, the son squeezed his hand on command, and he’s alive today to tell it.

George Pickering III squeezes his father’s hand on command three or four times, and that was supposed to be impossible. Doctors at Tomball Regional Medical Center near Houston had declared him brain dead after a massive stroke in January 2015 and ordered a terminal wean, the gradual withdrawal of life support. Because the 27-year-old was a registered organ donor, donation services had already been notified.

His father, George Pickering II, then 59, didn’t hold medical power of attorney and couldn’t stop it. So he walked into the ICU with a loaded 9 mm, ordered everyone out, and closed the curtain around his son’s bed. The standoff that followed ran three to four hours and brought in a SWAT team, sheriff’s negotiators, and a hospital lockdown before police used a robot to pull back the curtain. Pickering surrendered without a shot fired.Inside that curtain, he kept asking his son to squeeze his hand. He did.

Pickering spent about 11 months in jail on aggravated assault charges. One count was dismissed and the other reduced before his release in December 2015. His attorney, Phoebe Smith, called it “a father protecting his son when a son couldn’t protect himself.”

The son recovered, walking and talking within months, and the two later ran an electrical engineering business together. “There was a law broken, but it was broken for all the right reasons,” George III said. “I’m here now because of it. It was love, it was love

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