Nurse Lucy Letby Accused of TAMPERING WITH PREMATURE BABY’S BREATHING TUBE in Attempted Murder Case
Lucy Letby, a former nurse, has denied tampering with a premature baby’s breathing tube in an attempt to murder the kid, despite prosecutors claiming that she was caught “virtually red-handed.”
Lucy Letby is on trial in Manchester Crown Court for attempting to murder an infant named “Baby K” while working the nightshirt at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal ward on February 17, 2016.
Letby, 34, was convicted in August of murdering seven newborns and attempting to kill six more between July 2015 and June 2016. However, the jury was unable to reach a judgment on the claims surrounding “Baby K,” thus a retrial was ordered.
According to details revealed in her first trial, the disgraced nurse attacked infants by injecting insulin, milk, or air into their bodies, causing them to deteriorate suddenly and dramatically. She was accused of physically beating one baby, resulting in a liver injury equivalent to a traffic accident. According to Fox News Digital, Letby murdered or harmed 17 newborns, all but one of whom were preterm.
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Letby is accused of removing the infant’s endotracheal tube less than two hours after her birth on February 17, 2016. But in court on Tuesday, Letby told jurors that she did “nothing to harm [the baby],” according to The Guardian and that she was “not guilty of what [she] was found guilty of.”
Dr. Ravi Jayaram, a senior doctor, caught Letby “virtually red-handed” when he stepped into the nursery’s intensive care unit at 3:45 a.m. that evening, according to prosecutors. The doctor allegedly observed Letby doing nothing to help while the infant’s blood oxygen levels dropped and alarms on a monitor failed to activate.
Letby allegedly attempted to meddle with the infant’s replacement tubes twice more during the next few hours on the same shift.
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Letby stated in court that the hospital’s protocol is to wait and see if a baby “self-corrects” before intervening in these cases.
However, Elizabeth Morgan, a nursing advice consultant, stated that it would “not be normal nursing policy” to allow Baby K to “self-correct,” given that she was born 15 weeks prematurely and weighed little over one pound.
When queried about Morgan’s statement, Letby responded, “That’s her opinion,” according to The Guardian. “I cannot say if it is right or wrong. I just know what the policy was in Chester.”
Prosecutor Attorney Nick Johnson questioned whether the policy applied to premature babies like Baby K.
“For any baby,” Letby responded. “There isn’t a policy, but from my experience of working at Liverpool Women’s [hospital] and at the Countess of Chester, you would not immediately put your hands in the incubator and start doing something because the baby would often self-correct quite quickly.”
“You are lying because you were caught cold by Dr. Jayaram,” Johnson told the reporter.
“No,” said Letby.
Letby agreed that the youngster received a morphine infusion at about 4 a.m. and that a portable X-ray revealed the breathing tube in the proper spot at 6:10 a.m.
But the youngster desaturated again. Letby entered the nursery 15 minutes later, as suggested by prosecutors, to retrieve notes. After the infant was destabilized for the third and last time, prosecutors discovered that the breathing tube had migrated a fifth of the way in from where a doctor had placed it.
“That’s because you pushed it in, didn’t you?” Johnson stated.
Letby responded, “No.”
Letby claimed her only memory of the infant in question was that she was early. However, Johnson claims that Letby searched for the family’s surname on Facebook two years after the child was discharged from the newborn hospital and ten weeks before her initial police interview in July 2018.
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“[Baby K was] a child who, I suggest, you remembered very well,” Mr. Johnson added. Letby refuted the accusations.
During cross-examination, Johnson openly asked Letby if she “tried to kill [Baby K].”
“Thereafter, you tried to create the impression that [Baby K] was habitually desaturating and dislodging her tube, didn’t you?” He inquired.
“No,” Letby responded.
“Just like you tried to kill six other babies?” Johnson stated. “And you succeeded in murdering seven other children?”
“No,” the former nurse replied.
On February 17, 2016, Baby K was referred to a specialist hospital because of her exceptional preterm, according to foxnews. The infant died three days later. The prosecution does not claim that Letby caused her death.
Letby’s trial resumes next Monday when a judge will begin summarizing the case’s facts to a jury of six men and six women following closing statements from defense counsel and prosecutors.