Killer Nurse by John Foxjohn

survived, but now DaVita had a full-blown criminal investigation on its hands.
    Sergeant Abbott said later that DaVita had only one request: to let the rest of the patients finish their treatments and leave the clinic before the police began the main part of their investigation. Although defense attorney Ryan Deaton later claimed that DaVita had its hooks into everyone, including the police department, Sergeant Abbott said, “In my experience, there was never any interference in the investigation from DaVita or their attorneys.” He added, “Besides that, I’m not the type to allow interference in my investigations.” Coming from Sergeant Abbott, it was a simple statement of truth.
    As the detectives waited for the crime scene unit to arrive and the patients to leave, DaVita gave them a crash course on how dialysis worked, and the procedures that the PCTs and nurses had to follow. Like most police officers, other than basic lifesaving skills—CPR and things like that—Abbott and Shurley knew little about medical procedures, and absolutely nothing about the dialysis process.
    As the nurses took the detectives through the medical procedures and patient care, Sergeant Abbott asked questions and had them go through things again and again. As a colleague said of Abbott, “He always goes the extra mile to prepare himself for the investigation.” That proved to be an understatement.
    Once the crime scene unit arrived, they were directed to the reuse room to examine the evidence that Amy Clinton and Giselle Frenette had found. In the room were two sharps containers in biohazard bags, and Corporal Shurley, still dressed for battle, guarded the door to make sure no one could tamper with any evidence as the crime scene techs began to do their jobs.
    Although the DaVita inquiry later turned into a murder investigation—the first one Sergeant Abbott had ever headed—that night, all they were looking at was the injection of two patients with bleach. Since both patients had lived, the most anyone could be charged with in Texas was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—bleach, if it proved true—and at that point, both detectives had entertained some healthy skepticism about what the witnesses had said.
    One important thing the detectives learned was that DaVita had been keeping all the bloodlines used for the patients who suffered cardiac arrests while undergoing treatment on a dialysis machine. They kept the individual lines in marked biohazard bags in a freezer. Sergeant Abbott didn’t have a clue what to do with the bloodlines, but he instructed CSU to collect all of them and take them in as evidence. These later became the most important evidence in the entire case.
    In addition to the two sharps containers from the reuse room that Corporal Shurley was guarding, the two investigators also confiscated
every
sharps container in the clinic as evidence. Sergeant Abbott had the crime scene unit number and label every container based on the patient station numbers that were on the walls. They also made a chart of where each container had been before they took it into custody. Corporal Shurley said later that this was hugely important in the long run and defused a defense theory that DaVita was merely trying to cover up their own negligence by blaming a single employee. There was no way DaVita could have known in advance that the investigators would take all of the sharps containers.
    Next to the bloodlines, these sharps containers proved the most important evidence collected. They didn’t point to aggravated assault. They pointed to murder.

PART II
    SEARCH FOR JUSTICE

Neither evil tongues, rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e’er prevail against us.
    â€”WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

CHAPTER 8

    THE HAND GRENADE
    Sergeant Steve Abbott, Corporal Mike Shurley, and the crime scene techs