CNN —
Last year, Eddie Peterson lost consciousness at his home in Memphis and stopped breathing.
His wife, Lori, saved his life, performing CPR on him until paramedics arrived.
Peterson has Parkinson’s. His 76-year-old body is failing him, and has been for decades, but his mind is almost as sharp as when he was an assistant district attorney in Tennessee.
His speech is now slurred and stuttering. You can make out a few words here or there, but it’s impossible to fully understand Peterson if you aren’t familiar with him.
A man who made his living and forged his identity in the courtroom clocking 300 jury trials now struggles to get his point across, and even underwent an experimental surgery to implant a deep brain stimulator.
It helps, but we still have to check with Lori to make sure he said what we think he said.
“You’ve heard of friendly fire,” Peterson said.
“This is friendly water. It should never happen again,” he said.
Peterson’s first stop out of law school was the military. As a young man, serving as a judge advocate at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from 1975 to 1977, he was already ticking off two of his biggest goals in life: to work as a lawyer and to serve in the Marines.
He and as many as a million other young Marines, civilian staff and their family members who served and lived on base from 1953 to 1987 had no idea they were drinking, bathing their children and washing their clothes in water so contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and other...
After years of relentless advocacy and sustained public pressure by residents of St. Catharines, the City has issued a sweeping Property Standards Order to the owners of the former General Motors ...