And another Update to the Story from the other day

Because I know you are wondering what is the latest in this bizzar tale….

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Daytona Beach News-Journal
Link has photos

Pair happy, shooting victim says

By LYDA LONGA
Staff Writer

Last update: December 31, 2005

DAYTONA BEACH — A day after being shot in the head by his girlfriend — who later committed suicide — a Port Orange man lay in his hospital bed Friday, surrounded by notebook and pen-wielding reporters.

Glen Betterley, 53, his head swathed in bandages and gauze, invited the news media to visit him at Halifax Medical Center because, he said, “Why not ? I’m gonna be here all I day and I have to talk to somebody.”

And talk he did.

A laborer with a decorative concrete coating company in Port Orange, Betterley told the throng of print and television reporters standing in front of his bed why he thinks 65-year-old Emma “Wanda” Lorene Larsen shot him in the head with a small-caliber revolver in the wee hours of Thursday.

“She was depressed because she ran out of sleeping pills,” he said, frowning. “I don’t know why she would just end it like this.

“We got along great,” he said.

Neighbors said Thursday they never recall hearing the pair fight.

Betterley’s story seems taken from the pages of a quirky Carl Hiaasen book or some zany movie.

Betterley drove himself to work, decided he felt lousy, left his boss a note, then drove himself to the hospital. Doctors removed the bullet, which entered his left forehead, and bone fragments, Halifax spokeswoman Kate Holcomb said.

“That’s what you call a loyal employee,” said Diane DallaChiara, who, along with her husband, Mike, owns Concrete Technology where Betterley has worked for eight years.

“He’s like a cat with nine lives,” she said. “He told my husband that he was coming back to work in a couple of days.”

Betterley’s awareness with a bullet lodged in his brain is not that uncommon, a doctor told The Associated Press.

“I’ve had patients with knives in their heads, screwdrivers in their heads, lawn darts, small-caliber gunshot wounds to the head, where patients have been awake and talking,” said Dr. Jonathan Greenberg, a neurosurgeon at Orlando Regional Medical Center. “The question is how important is the area that is damaged?”

According to Betterley, the relationship was so peachy between him and Larsen that the couple had dinner Thursday night, watched TV and “had sex” before the shot was fired.

“We were gonna get married in February,” he said.

After he discovered his bloodied face and head about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, Betterley said he tried unsuccessfully to get Larsen to tell whether she knew what had happened.

When Larsen said she had no idea, he went into the bathroom, cleaned himself up and went to work.

“Blood was gushing out of the side of my head, but I didn’t think nothing of it,” Betterley told reporters Friday. “I went to work. But when I got there, I didn’t feel too good and the blood kept gushing out. So I left my boss a note telling him that I was going to the hospital.”

But just like in a Hiaasen novel about weird Florida crime, there’s always a tragic circumstance of some sort.

A short while after police talked to Betterley in the Halifax emergency room, they drove to her mobile home on Orange Avenue in Port Orange. They made phone contact, then heard a single shot and found Larsen inside, dead.

Betterley said Larsen, who has a son and a daughter living out of state, had first threatened to commit suicide about two weeks ago.

“I told her she could go ahead and kill herself, but not to involve me,” Betterley said with a shrug. “But I guess she wanted to take me along with her.”

lyda.longa@news-jrnl.com