Serial killings in hospitals called rare
Allegations that a doctor gave potentially fatal doses of a painkiller to 27 patients in the Mount Carmel Health System have shaken the Columbus medical community.
But cases of medical staff members intentionally causing harm or death are very rare, say those involved in the matter.
Mount Carmel Health System says William Husel, an intensive-care doctor who has been fired, gave “significantly excessive and potentially fatal” doses of pain medication to at least 27 near-death patients between 2015 and 2018.
Attorney Gerald Leeseberg, who has filed suit against Husel in the deaths of at least two patients, said that people shouldn’t be concerned for their safety or that of their loved ones in hospitals.
“To try to allay people’s Swango
fears, I’ve been doing this for 35 years and — ever since the Michael Swango incident — we really have not seen a situation like this occur again,” Leeseberg said. “There have been isolated incidents around the country, the so-called ‘angels of mercy.’ It happens, and people need to be aware, alert and keep their eyes and ears open, but on a day-in, dayout basis, this is just really an extraordinary and uncommon situation.”
Swango, once a medical intern at Ohio State University, admitted to killing four people, including 19-year-old Cynthia Mcgee, at OSU Hospitals in 1984. He was suspected of killing up to 35 people in the 1980s and 1990s. Swango confessed to poisoning people with arsenic or giving them lethal doses of prescription drugs. In some cases, he would sit in the room and watch his patient die. He is serving three life sentences in a Colorado prison.
Over the past 40 years, there have been fewer than a dozen high-profile instances in which doctors or nurses were found to have purposely killed patients.
In most cases, the doctors or nurses used prescription drugs to cause deaths. Nearly all of them said they did so to end the pain and suffering of their patients.
• Dr. Kermit Gosnell was a Philadelphia physician who now is serving three life sentences for killing several babies after delivering them. Gosnell said he was performing abortions for women, but prosecutors said he delivered babies late in the pregnancy and then severed their spinal cords with scissors. Gosnell was charged with eight murders and convicted of three in 2013.
• Texas nurse Genene Jones is serving a 99-year sentence for killing two children with fatal injections, one of a blood thinner and the other with a muscle-paralysis drug. Jones has confessed to killing more children with fatal injections while working at a charity hospital in the 1970s.
• Hospital orderly Donald Harvey was called the “Angel of Death” for killing 24 people at Cincinnati’s Drake Hospital in the mid-1980s. Harvey said the killings were mostly “mercy killings” of terminally ill patients. He was beaten to death in a prison cell in 2017.
• Charles Cullen pleaded guilty to 29 murders in 2006 while he was a nurse in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Cullen said he killed patients to end their suffering by giving them fatal doses of prescription drugs. Cullen said he likely killed 40 patients at 10 facilities over a 16-year period.
• Kristen Gilbert injected large doses of epinephrine to cause heart attacks in patients at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts. She killed four people. She was found guilty of murder in 2001 and is serving four life sentences in a federal prison in Texas.
• Nurse Kimberly Clark Saenz was found guilty in 2012 of killing five patients by injecting bleach into their kidney dialysis lines at a facility in Texas.