Letby ‘hovered around my baby hours before she died’
A NURSE accused of killing seven babies was ‘ hovering’ around a sick girl hours before her condition rapidly deteriorated and she died, her mother said yesterday.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told her husband to ask Lucy Letby to ‘go away and give us some privacy’ nine hours before her daughter died, she told a jury.
The woman said she later saw Letby, 32, with a doctor who was desperately trying to give CPR to their baby when she suddenly collapsed in the middle of the night.
Letby is accused of murdering the three-day-old infant, referred to as Baby D, by injecting air into her bloodstream during a night shift at the Countess of Chester Hospital, in Cheshire, in June 2015. She was the fourth baby attacked and the third child killed by Letby in the space of a fortnight, it is claimed.
Letby denies seven counts of murder and ten of attempted murder against 17 victims.
The mother told Manchester Crown Court: ‘As we got in the room [Letby] was sort of hovering around Baby D but not doing much. She was sort of looking at the machines.
‘I asked if everything was okay and she said, ‘’Yes, she’s fine.’’
‘It was the first time in 24 hours that I had seen Baby D. She could have just left us to it but she stuck around, she was watching and looking over to us and I asked my husband, “Can you tell her to go away or give us some privacy?”’
Ben Myers, defending, said it was ‘disputed’ that Letby was the nurse spoken to by Baby D’s parents at that time.
She then described the harrowing moment she and her husband watched their daughter die, having been woken in the middle of the night and told to rush to her bedside.
‘We were woken up at around 4am in the morning by a nurse who was in panic,’ she said.
‘She just said [Baby D] was very poorly and you need to come down. Dr Andrew Brunton was holding her, trying to resuscitate. He was trying really hard. We were just standing there looking at [ my daughter] dying.’
She said Letby was holding a phone to his ear, adding that a consultant then told Dr Brunton: ‘You’ve got to let her go.’
The mother said: ‘ He stopped massaging her and pronounced the time of her death and I couldn’t stay in the room any more, so I asked my husband to take me away.’
The court heard Baby D was born weighing 6lbs 14oz around 60 hours after her mother’s waters had broken at home. Jurors were told the mother should have been given antibiotics to ward off infection but this did not happen. Only after she appealed to medics did they agree to give her a Caesarean section instead of waiting for a natural birth.
Soon after delivery, however, Baby D became floppy and started having breathing problems. She was admitted to the neo-natal unit at around three hours old.
Baby D’s father said he visited his daughter regularly the next day because his wife felt unwell following the infant’s delivery.
The court heard nurses made him a card, with Baby D’s picture on it, and reassured him about her condition. ‘At the time I was never given the impression Baby D’s condition was life-threatening and it didn’t even cross my mind that she was in danger of dying,’ he said in a statement read to jurors.
The prosecution allege that Letby tried to kill Baby D twice before succeeding on the third attempt.
Letby, of Hereford, denies 22 charges between June 2015 and June 2016. The case continues.