In autumn 2020, an arrest in Munich made the headlines: a nurse is said to have tried to kill patients in the hospital. It is now clear that this was probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Munich – Gruesome suspicion in Munich: In a hospital, i.e. where people are actually fighting for the health and lives of patients, someone who had the exact opposite in mind is said to have worked.
The public prosecutor has accused a nurse from a Munich clinic of two counts of murder and six attempted murders. That said a spokeswoman for the Munich I public prosecutor’s office of the German Press Agency. The indictment had already been brought before the jury at the Munich I district court at the beginning of August – for murder in two cases and for attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm in six cases – and for theft. According to prosecutors, the two fatalities were 80 and 89 years old.
Motive: craving for recognition?
The case first made headlines in November 2020. At that time there was already talk of a suspected “death nurse”. At that time, the authorities announced that they were investigating three cases on suspicion of attempted murder. When he was arrested, the public prosecutor accused the 24-year-old of having put three patients aged 54, 90 and 91 in mortal danger with medication out of sheer craving for recognition, in order to then shine in their rescue. Chat logs suggested that, as the public prosecutor announced at the time.
An attentive senior physician at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar was taken aback because the condition of two patients had suddenly and inexplicably deteriorated. Internal investigations revealed indications of a similar case in which the accused was also on duty. The suspicion: the nurse injected the patient with an overdose of a drug that should not be given to them. Traces of these non-prescribed drugs were found in the patients’ blood. The clinic reported the nurse, who denied the allegations made when he was arrested.
The trained geriatric nurse from North Rhine-Westphalia had come to the clinic since July 2020 via a temporary work agency and was mainly employed there in the so-called guard station, an intermediate station between the intensive care and normal wards, where the sick were cared for around the clock. The police investigative team that dealt with the case was therefore called the “guard station”.
In the clinic on the right of the Isar, the alleged crime scene, nobody wanted to comment on the case at the beginning of the year. “After consultation with the investigative authorities, only they will inform you about the case. We are cooperating very closely with the authorities,” said a spokeswoman. The spokeswoman also did not want to comment on the question of whether safety precautions in the clinic had been tightened.
Similar cases previously known
The case is reminiscent of the patient killer Niels Högel, who became known as the “death nurse”, and who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 by the Oldenburg Regional Court for murder in 85 cases. He worked as a nurse in intensive care in clinics in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst and, according to the regional court, killed a total of 85 patients there by administering drugs that were not medically indicated. It is said that he was primarily concerned with being able to try to resuscitate the patients afterwards and to look good in front of colleagues.
Homicides in nursing repeatedly make headlines across Germany: At the beginning of October 2020, the Munich I Regional Court sentenced a nursing assistant to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention for the murder of three patients. The man from Poland had injected old people he was supposed to care for with insulin, which can be fatal in an overdose.
In 2016, the Munich I Regional Court sentenced a midwife from the Großhadern Clinic to 15 years in prison for seven attempted murders in the delivery room. The court was convinced that the woman had secretly given blood thinners to patients who were giving birth by caesarean section. Without emergency surgery they would have died. dpa
