Hospital nurse convicted of killing 6 patients
||| ORVILLE LYNN MAJORS | 1961- 2017
INDIANAPOLIS — Orville Lynn Majors, who was convicted of killing six people while he was a nurse at a rural Indiana hospital, has died while serving a 360- year sentence, state prison officials said Monday.
The 56- year- old Majors was having breathing problems and became unresponsive Sunday at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, according to the Indiana Department of Correction. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Preliminary autopsy results show Majors had heart problems and died of natural causes, the department said.
Majors was convicted in 1999 on murder charges that he gave lethal injections of heart- stopping drugs to ailing patients in the mid- 1990s at the former Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, about 60 miles west of Indianapolis near the Indiana- Illinois state line. The jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on a seventh murder count.
He was suspected of causing dozens of more deaths.
Prosecutors said Majors injected the patients with epinephrine and potassium chloride while he was a licensed practical nurse in the intensive care unit of the rural community’s hospital.
Prosecutors built their case around the fact that Majors was present, and often alone, when each patient died. They also presented as evidence vials of potassium chloride and syringes found by Indiana State Police investigators at a house where Majors once lived in.
Statistical studies linked Majors to as many as 130 of 147 deaths at the hospital’s ICU — many involving sudden respiratory failures — from May 1993 to March 1995, but Judge Ernest Yelton didn’t allow the information to be used as evidence at Majors’ trial.
Yelton, who is now retired, said during the sentencing that Majors “committed diabolical acts that extinguished the frail lives of six people.”
On Monday, Yelton said he realized many other families believed Majors killed their relatives and that the case leaves unresolved grief in the rural county of about 16,000 residents.
“It cut a broad swath across Vermillion County and caused an incredible amount of pain and anguish,” he said.
Majors maintained his innocence, and his defense attorneys presented medical experts and family doctors during his trial who said the seven patients he was charged with killing all died naturally.
Survivors of about 80 patients who died while Majors was at the hospital in Clinton filed wrongful- death lawsuits, said Terre Haute attorney Eric Frey, who represented many of the families. Most of those were settled through the state compensation fund for patients, he said.