The 49 year old Belgian woman is very wealthy. She checked into a five star hotel in New York and gave her son an overdose of medicine. She apparently tried to do the same, but her suicide did not work. In a farewell letter she explained that her son had been the victim of sexual abuse.

In the same farewell letter she left 12 million dollars to the aid agency Doctors Without Borders (Artsen Zonder Grenzen in Dutch, Médecins Sans Frontières in French) and 8 million dollars to the Red Cross for the campaign to help Haiti.