The nurse was also accused of attempting to murder 10 other infants at the same neonatal unit
London:
A nurse at a UK hospital tried to kill a baby girl four times before succeeding, then sent a sympathy card to the victim’s parents, a court said on Wednesday.
Lucy Letby is accused of murdering the girl and six other babies at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England between June 2015 and June 2016.
She was also accused of attempting to murder 10 other infants at the same neonatal unit during the same period.
Attorney Nick Johnson said the girl’s death – referred to in court as “Child I” – was “extreme even by the standards of this overall case”.
“This is a case where we allege Lucy Letby tried to kill her four times,” the prosecutor told the jury at Manchester Crown Court.
“(Child I) is resilient but in the end on the fourth attempt, Lucy Letby succeeds and kills her.”
Letby, 32, from Hereford, western England, is accused of intentionally putting air into the girl’s stomach through a nasogastric tube.
The girl’s first attempt at life is said to have occurred on September 30, 2015 when she struggled to breathe after Letby fed her.
The second was on a night shift on October 13 when Letby remarked to a colleague that “My baby” looked pale in her cot in a dark room.
Colleagues examined the infant and found that she “appeared dead and not breathing,” Johnson said.
‘Calculate’
“Child I” recovered and Letby was assigned to nurse her but the next night’s shift, she was “brought back from the brink of death”.
She collapsed again on October 23 and was successfully resuscitated but hours after showing signs of recovery, her alarm screen went off.
A colleague helped find Letby by the incubator and was told she “should be able to sort it out”. The child then collapsed and died.
A pediatrician concluded that the collapse could have been caused by a large amount of air being intentionally introduced into the girl’s stomach through a nasogastric tube.
In the fourth, air may have been injected directly into her bloodstream, jurors said.
Johnson said Letby was interviewed by police and accepted to send a sympathy card to the girl’s parents but said it was because she got to know them.
She also keeps a picture of the card on her phone and searches for the girl’s parents on Facebook, as she did with the other three babies in this case.
“(Baby I) was born very early and very young. But he survived the first two months of his life and was healthy by the time Lucy Letby started looking after him,” Johnson said.
“What happened to (Child I) follows the pattern of what has happened to other people before and what hasn’t happened to others.
“It’s stubborn, it’s calculated and it’s cold-blooded.”
Letby has denied seven counts of murder and 15 counts of willful murder of 17 children, none of whom could be identified by court order.
The court has said that she attempted to murder several infants more than once.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
