British justice is currently trying to understand the deaths of babies in Chester between June 2015 and June 2016. A British nurse suspected of the murders of seven newborn babies and attempted murders of ten others in an English hospital was charged on Monday at the start of its trial of being “the common denominator” in infant deaths.
Lucy Letby, 32, who worked in the neonatal ward at the Countess of Chester Hospital in north west England, has denied the murders of five little boys and two little girls and the attempted murders of ten other babies. A day-old baby, a twin, had died after deliberately injecting air into the blood, an expert said, 30 minutes after the nurse went on duty. The baby’s twin, also poisoned, survived. Two other babies had been poisoned with insulin, according to prosecutor Nick Johnson. They also survived.
“A poisoner in the hospital ward”
The prosecutor clarified that in one case, the nurse was suspected of having tried three times to kill a newborn. He told jurors at Manchester Court that the hospital’s neonatal ward had seen a “significant” rise in the death rate and number of infants fainting from January 2015 and continued for 18 months. For Nick Johnson, the reason is simple: “there was a poisoner in the hospital ward”.
Pediatric consultants had been concerned as early as June 2015 about the higher than usual number of newborn deaths, many of which were described as “unexplained” or “unexpected”, according to a report published in July 2016 by the College. Pediatrics and Child Health Royal. “After looking for a cause, the consultants noticed that the deaths or fainting had a common denominator,” the prosecutor explained to the jurors. It was “the presence of a nurse, and that nurse was Lucy Letby,” he said, pointing out that many of the deaths had taken place at night when she was on call.
A total of 22 counts
Above all, “when Lucy Letby was switched to daytime hours, the fainting and deaths went to daytime hours,” he added. The nurse was arrested and then charged in November 2020 as part of the investigation into these deaths, after having already been questioned twice in 2018 and 2019, without action at the time. Now, Lucy Letby must answer a total of 22 counts because she is accused of having tried to kill certain infants on several occasions.