HOUSTON -- A 68-year-old man on life support was transferred to a San Antonio nursing home Sunday days before a Houston hospital had planned to disconnect the machines.

Spiro Nikolouzos arrived at Avalon Place after he was released from St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, where he had been cared for since February.

"This hospital wanted to execute him," Jannette Nikolouzos, the patient's wife, said. "Free at last, free at last ... you didn't get to kill him."

Spiro Nikolouzos has been an invalid since 2001, when he experienced bleeding related to a shunt in his brain.

Jannette Nikolouzos, 53, had cared for her husband at their Friendswood home, feeding him through a tube in his stomach. On Feb. 10, the area around the tube started bleeding, and Jannette Nikolouzos rushed her husband to St. Luke's for emergency care. He was then placed on a ventilator.

The family has been involved in a court battle with St. Luke's Hospital since March 1, when doctors notified the family that life-sustaining care of the husband and father would be halted in 10 days after they determined he was brain dead.

A state law passed in 1999 gives hospitals the authority to remove patients from life support but requires they give the family 10 days notice to find another facility.

That's when Jannette Nikolouzos and her family attorney found the San Antonio facility.

"The owner of the facility, I explained to her what was going on and she thought it was just horrible what they were doing to Spiro," Jannette Nikolouzos said. "She told me, 'Yes, he can come to my facility.'"

A spokesman for St. Luke's Hospital said the hospital only wanted what was best for Nikolouzos and felt that continued care for the man was futile and inhumane.

"For (Jannette Nikolouzos) to characterize this as the hospital wanting to execute her husband obviously is inflammatory and is not true. It is very disheartening when someone says that, especially when you think you are a very caring organization," Dr. david Pate, of St. Luke's Hospital, said.