Killer Nurse by John Foxjohn Page A

stayed at DaVita until around ten thirty that night collecting all the evidence, taking pictures, and speaking with members of DaVita’s hierarchy—namely, Jerry McNeill and Amy Clinton.
    After hearing what DaVita had to say, Sergeant Abbott called his immediate supervisor, a lieutenant who was off that day, and then the assistant and chief of police to inform them of what he had. His supervisors didn’t offer him any advice or tell him how to proceed. After all, he was the one who cleaned up the messes, not them, and this kind of situation had never come up before. Sergeant Abbott said later, “That first day we didn’t know enough to know what made sense or what didn’t.”
    But meanwhile at DaVita, Sergeant Abbott was still finding out plenty.
    Sergeant Abbott had the CSU sit in Ms. Hall’s and Ms. Hamilton’s chairs and take pictures of people sitting in the alleged victims’ chairs. These pictures along with the measurements offered valuable insight into what kind of sight lines the witnesses could have had.
    While the CSU was taking the containers and making the chart, Sergeant Abbott decided to test what he’d been told about procedures by Clinton and McNeill. He stopped an employee at random to question about the process of getting the two pails of bleach water, and policies they had to follow. The employee, who turned out to be Yazmin Santana, a PCT, told him the same thing the DaVita administrators had. Abbott specifically asked her about the practice of using a syringe to measure bleach, and Santana responded that they always used a cup to measure the bleach. She was emphatic that it was never acceptable to use a syringe to measure bleach—though she did tell him that a week earlier in a meeting, a teammate, she couldn’t remember who, had suggested using a syringe. However, no one agreed that this was a proper method, and they had all agreed to continue using the measuring cups.
    Santana also emphasized using a syringe to measure bleach would require one to pour the bleach into something first before drawing it into a syringe. The best thing they had for that was the measuring cup they were supposed to use to start with. So what would be the point of using a syringe?
    Before Sergeant Abbott left that night, state health officials gave him a report on the blood samples taken from Ms. Risinger and Ms. Rhone—the two patients whom the witnesses claimed Saenz had injected with bleach. The report confirmed that both patients had been exposed to bleach poisoning.
    Sergeant Abbott also learned that Clinton had arrived on April 2 and brought several specialists with her to inspect all aspects of the clinic. In April, Clinton spent 90 percent of her time at the clinic. After the two patients died on April 1, DaVita didn’t have another documented occurrence, one they kept bloodlines on, until April 16, when Mr. Kelley coded while on the machine—likely because of all the monitors and Clinton’s near constant presence. At that point, even though DaVita investigators didn’t believe reuse dialyzers were causing the problems, they stopped using reuse dialyzers.
    Then Clinton passed along what two employees had said to Sandy Lawrence, who was the facility administrator prior to Clinton’s arrival, that it had to be an employee who was harming the patients. As badly as Clinton didn’t want to believe Ms. Hall’s and Ms. Hamilton’s stories, in the back of her mind, she realized they now had the answer they’d been searching for.
    Before the detectives left that Monday night, Clinton confirmed what Yazmin Santana had already told them: at no time were the employees—or anyone else, for that matter—supposed to use a syringe to measure bleach. There was no reason for the syringes to come in contact with bleach at all. The bleach solutions DaVita used for cleaning and disinfecting were mixed in the back, not at the patient care