The justice found guilty this Friday the British nurse Lucy Letby, 33, of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others in a hospital in Chester (northwest England) between 2015 and 2016.
During the trial, The evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office indicated that Letby killed the children, five boys and two girls, injecting them with air with an intravenous syringe while working at the Countess of Chester Health Center.
The woman, who was already suspected of the crimes since 2018 -when she was first arrested-, was arrested again in 2020 and charged by the police after receiving authorization from the Crown Prosecutor’s Office, who presented 22 charges against her.
The aforementioned court also found her guilty of the attempted murder of six other babies with methods that included, in addition to air injection, insulin poisoning or the administration of excessive amounts of food. The sentence will be announced on August 21.
By contrast, the jury, which deliberated for more than 110 hours, found Letby, who was not present in court, not guilty of two attempted murders, while a verdict on six other attempts was not reached.
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This is how the murders happened
The charges for which she was convicted correspond to the period between June 2015 and June 2016, when there were several deaths of newborns from unexplained causes at the Countess of Chester hospital.
The case shocked the United Kingdom from the moment suspicions of the deaths of newborns began to fall on her in 2018.
He was the only person in the medical staff always on duty during all those deaths.as noted by Judge James Goss.
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Letby worked as a trainee student at the public center for three years, before finishing her studies at the local university and specializing in
child nurse.
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Since then, the convicted woman has worked in the neonatal unit, specializing in babies that require different levels of care.
I would have also added insulin to the feeding bags
Each year, this unit cares for about 400 babies, but since the end of July 2016, it stopped admitting children born before 32 weeks of gestation, moment from which no more deaths were recorded.
A report published in 2017 by the Royal Medical College of Paediatrics and Child Health concluded that there was “no cause” to explain the increase in deaths in the unit registered as of 2014. In that year, three newborns died, while in Eight did so in 2015 and six in 2016.
Letby was charged with injecting air into the babies intravenously, use naso-gastric tubes to send them air or an overdose of milk into their stomach.
He also would have added insulin to feeding bags, changed a breathing tube to one preemie, and overfed another. Sometimes, he used several methods at the same time. At that time he was 25 years old.
Letby would attack newborns after their parents left, when the head nurse left or at night when she was alone, the prosecutor explained. She sometimes joined the staff’s efforts to save the babies, or helped desperate parents.
At the trial, the babies were identified with letters, from A to Q, to protect the families. Parents testified, often in tears.
“I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I wasn’t good enough to take care of them. I’m a horrible person,” the nurse wrote in a note found at her home in 2018. In other documents, she said she was innocent.
His lawyer, Ben Myers, insisted that the hospital’s neonatal service welcomed “more babies than usual, with greater medical needs” in 2015-2016, and had “failed” in its actions.
This ruling “will not prevent the extreme pain, anger and suffering that we have all felt,” the families of the victims reacted in a statement. “Perhaps we will never know why this happened,” they added.
*With EFE and AFP
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