Gary Coleman's Wife Claims She HAD to Pull the Plug

Last week it was revealed that the late actor Gary Coleman's ex-wife, Shannon Price, failed a lie detector test concerning her actions in his last days [click here if you missed that]. 

Now Shannon claims she had no other choice than to pull the plug on Gary's respirator...

From People

Shannon Price is addressing the controversial decision she made to end ex-husband Gary Coleman’s life.

In May 2010, the late actor was placed in a medically-induced coma after suffering an intracranial hemorrhage from a fall. Two days later, Price instructed the hospital to take Coleman off life support despite his living will requesting he be kept alive for 15 days before terminating treatment.

“I had no choice,” Price claims in the upcoming A&E special, Lie Detector: Truth or Deception. “He had gone into cardiac arrest, and that is ultimately what took his life.”

“They called me Thursday morning and said, ‘Does Gary have a DNR [do not resuscitate order]?’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah, resuscitate him.’ I tried. I tried to do everything in my will.”

“Thursday I go visit him, speak with the doctors, and they are like, ‘Shannon, we do not think that he is going to make it until Friday,’” she continues. “Meaning his condition is not going to get any better. I made the right decision.”

When pressed about her reasoning for her confidence that the Diff’rent Strokes star, who was 42, would not recover, Price says, “I asked the questions, I saw the condition he was in.”

“I just knew,” she insists. “I mean, he was basically already gone. And I said, ‘Okay, are his eyes dilated?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Okay, can I see?’ And they showed me, and that’s when I knew.”

“Doctors at the hospital assumed Shannon was still married to Gary when in fact they had been divorced in secret,” he reveals. “Shannon presented a document at the hospital naming her as the decision maker on Gary's advanced medical directive, giving her the right to make decisions about his end of life treatment and care.”

The pair tied the knot in August 2007 and divorced the following year, which Price called “a mistake.”

“It was my decision, he did not want the divorce,” she says, adding: “I was just still at the house. My stuff was there, everything was there, we were still together.”

“There’s two things I regret: divorcing him, and not being able to save his life,” she later confesses.

In a recording of the 911 call she made when she allegedly discovered Coleman in a pool of blood in their Utah home, Price could be heard refusing to listen to the operator’s instructions to help him.

“As far as rendering aid, I could have helped him a little bit more,” she admits while going over results for a polygraph exam she voluntarily took in the docuseries.

While she maintained her innocence relating to the incident entirely — citing Coleman’s death being ruled accidental and never having any charges filed against her — the lie detector showed “deception indicated” when directly asked if she physically caused Coleman’s fall.

“You say you have nothing to hide. I say you know exactly why you failed this test,” the polygraph examiner, George Olivo, says. “Sadly, my professional opinion is the truth is not on your side today.”

“And I figured it wouldn't be,” Price chimes in, to which Olivo replies, “Because you already knew you were gonna fail, and you know why you did.”