In testimony given in the trial of alleged murderer nurse Lucy Letby, a doctor from the United Kingdom described how one baby’s condition worsened as a result of receiving care from the accused nurse.
“It’s nothing I’ve seen before or since,” Dr David Harkness, a consultant pediatrician who was a registrar during Letby’s time working at Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit between 2015 and 2016.
Letby called Harkness into a room when a child started vomiting blood, and within an hour the child’s condition started rapidly deteriorating with purple patches appearing on his stomach, according to Harkness.
Harkness claimed that despite being aware of the child’s critical condition, he initially did not think the infant would survive.
The child died an hour later.
“It happened right in front of our faces as we were standing there,” Harkness said.
In England, Letby, 32, is on trial for allegedly killing seven babies and trying to kill ten more.
According to the prosecutor, Letby gave some infants insulin or milk injections and others air injections. She allegedly made three attempts to kill one baby.
When the trial started in September, prosecutor Nick Johnson told the jury that Letby was a “constant, malevolent presence” in the neonatal unit of the hospital in northwest England.
Johnson told jurors “a poisoner was at work” at the hospital, which he said had been marked by a “significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses” after January 2015, before which he said its rates of infant mortality were normal by any hospital standards.
Investigators determined Letby was the “common denominator,” and that the infant deaths matched with her shifting work hours.
Leave a Comment