A woman from Johnson County who used to live in Chillicothe respiratory therapist stated that she had something to do with the poisoning deaths of two patients.
Jennifer Hall, who is 42 years old, admitted to two counts of first-degree involuntary murder and one count of second-degree assault on Friday in Livingston County Circuit Court.
Hall was caught last May and charged with first-degree murder for the death of 75-year-old Fern Franco. In February of this year, he was charged with the same crime for the death of 37-year-old David Wesley Harper.
When they both died in 2002, they were both patients at the Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe, where Hall worked.
From December 2001 to May 2002, Hall worked at the hospital. During that time, there were 18 heart arrests or “Code Blue” events and nine “medically suspicious” deaths, according to the charges. Before that, the hospital got about one “Code Blue” every year, on average.
“She liked Code Blues,” a nurse said in a statement.
Franco, who had been taken to the hospital for asthma on May 18, 2002, was found dead the next morning. He was thought to be Hall’s last victim there. A person who saw Hall in Franco’s room before told the police about it.
On May 21, 2002, Hall was put on administrative leave.
Franco Had Morphine and Succinylcholine in Her Body
The Livingston County Coroner, Scott Lindley, did an autopsy on Franco and found that she had morphine and succinylcholine in her body. Neither of these drugs had been given to Franco and would have made it harder for her lungs to get oxygen.
Lindley told The Star Saturday that succinylcholine is a muscle blocker that can be hard to find after a person has died. Even though an autopsy was done, prosecutors at first didn’t think they had enough proof to bring the case to court.
When a patient’s heart stopped on February 18, 2002, and he worked hard to get it going again, a doctor named Cal Greenlaw thought something was wrong at the hospital.
The tweet below verifies the news:
“I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that she always thought she would never be prosecuted,” the Livingston County Coroner told The Star Saturday. https://t.co/dV6v2Q6ErK
— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) April 22, 2023
After a nurse told him about two other strange code blue deaths, Greenlaw told hospital officials that he thought “there was someone on staff at Hedrick who was trying to kill patients and sometimes succeeding.” He said that Hall was the killer, but court records show that the hospital didn’t do anything to find out if it was true.
Later, the families of people who died while Hall worked there sued the hospital.
Lindley said it was a “big deal” that Hall admitted to giving the patients drugs without permission, even though the charges were less serious than what prosecutors had first filed.
He said, “I don’t think there’s any question in my mind that she always thought she would never be charged.”
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