‘Damn mad’ at killer, red tape
Bureaucracy grates at inquiry into killer nurse
Lawyer Alex Van Kralingen called it the most ghastly image.
“It is obscene to think of a frail old man pawing away at a nurse who is trying to kill him with an injection,” he said.
Van Kralingen is one of two lawyers, Paul Scott the other, who represent families and friends of the victims of health care serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer. Van Kralingen was speaking about Arpad Horvath, a wonderful Hungarian immigrant who started his own tool-and-die company and loved his adopted country with all his big heart.
But though he was 75, frail and with dementia, the old man still had wit enough to know something bad was his way coming. He tried to fend off Wettlaufer as she gave him two lethal insulin injections.
As Wettlaufer later told the Ontario Provincial Police, in her jarringly breezy manner, “He (Horvath) fought it, the first needle.” She prevailed, however, and by then had refined her technique enough that she knew to deliver two kinds of insulin, one swift-acting, one long-acting.
Thus the terrible vision that stuck with Van Kralingen.
Obscene it is, but no more so than the exercise in collective arse-covering, avoidance of responsibility and blame-shifting that Horvath’s son, Arpad Jr., has seen from the public inquiry investigating how Wettlaufer was able to go undetected for so long.
In 2016 she confessed to murdering eight patients and attempting to kill six others over nearly a decade. A shaved-headed fireplug of a man whose dad was his friend, teacher and hero, he turned pink with rage as he addressed the inquiry on Monday in St. Thomas.
“I’m so damn mad,” he said. “They (all the institutional players, from care home to nurses union to administrators to government) put money and reputation in front of a human life! He’d (his father) be alive today if it wasn’t for the gross incompetence of people.”
Horvath Jr. was one of a handful of relatives — and in one case, a woman, Beverley Bertram, now 70, who survived a Wettlaufer visit to her house and said “I don’t know why she was so bent and determined to kill me” — who spoke directly to inquiry commissioner Ontario Court of Appeal Judge Eileen Gillese. Virtually all of them thanked her and inquiry staff for having run such a fair and thorough process. They were grateful and emotional; the judge, intense and with a catch in her voice when she spoke, returned the favour.
But like Horvath Jr., the families are also cynical and skeptical. What was perhaps most clear to them is how easy it was for Wettlaufer to go about killing the vulnerable for a decade, at three care homes and while working for two agencies, visiting people who were ill or in need but still living in their own houses. The long-term care bureaucracy appears as opaque and Byzantine to those who work inside it as it does to the rest of the world: Home administrators don’t know their own rules, let alone the government regulations that ostensibly govern them; the homes are so chronically, permanently, always short-staffed that nurses wouldn’t have time to report on a flawed process or colleague even if they had the inclination; the nurses union fights for its members reflexively, even the bad ones.
This short-staffing — at times when Wettlaufer was working overnights, she was in charge of between 90 and 99 residents — was so acute that once, when one of the homes was briefly not allowed to take in any new residents, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Workers were able to get their old patients to the toilet in time. They were able to have five minutes to chat with them. That was the exception. The norm is the opposite: Residents lie in their own waste for a while; no one on staff has the luxury of a kind word.
When Wettlaufer was fired from the Caressant Care home in Woodstock, around the corner and down the 401 from St. Thomas, the union by threat of grievance managed to “convert” the firing into a resignation and a neutral reference letter for Wettlaufer from craven management.
Thus was she hired at Meadow Park, where she soon got busy and killed Horvath.
In theory, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care has inspectors; in practice, they don’t have enough of them. And, as with childwelfare agencies decades ago, they apparently schedule their rare inspections — you know, so the home has time to put on its best face. Putting Horvath into a care home was an agonizing decision for his son, Arpad Jr., and his wife Audrey. But they had three young children at home, and though Arpad Jr. saw his dad every day, and on his last night sat by his bedside, “I couldn’t stay overnights. I couldn’t live there.” He is wracked with guilt and remorse, though he has no reason to be. They did their very best, there so frequently their youngest, then just four, often falling asleep with her head on her grandpa.
Those who have reason to feel regret or remorse — the care home owners, their association, the administrators, the union, the government, all of them conspiring not to allow a serial killer to roam free (none would have wanted that), but to provide the bare minimum of care to tired old people on their way out — appeared to have none or little of that. That is what Horvath found most grating and galling, I think: He felt so awful, and he did nothing but love his dad; they collectively did so little, and yet they appear to feel nothing.