Lucy Letby, a former nurse, has claimed that she tampered with a premature baby’s breathing tube to try to kill the child, but prosecutors say she was caught “virtually red-handed.”
Lucy Letby is on trial in Manchester Crown Court for trying to kill a baby named “Baby K” on February 17, 2016, while she was working as a nightshirt at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s newborn unit.
Letby, who is 34 years old, was found guilty in August of killing seven babies and trying to kill six more between July 2015 and June 2016. However, that jury couldn’t decide what to do about the claims against “Baby K,” so a new trial was set up.
According to what was said in her first hearing, the nurse who was fired hurt babies by injecting them with insulin, milk, or air, which caused them to quickly get worse. She was charged of hitting one baby so hard that it hurt its liver like it had been in a car accident. Fox News Digital earlier reported that Letby killed or hurt 17 babies, all but one of whom were born early.
It is alleged that Letby moved the baby’s endotracheal tube less than two hours after she was born on February 17, 2016. However, Letby told the judges on Tuesday that she “did nothing to harm [the baby]” and that she was “not guilty of what [she was found guilty of].”
Prosecutors say that senior doctor Dr. Ravi Jayaram caught Letby “virtually red-handed” when he walked into the nursery’s urgent care room that night at 3:45 a.m. The baby’s blood oxygen levels dropped and alarms on a monitor didn’t go off, but the doctor says Letby did nothing to help.
Letby is said to have tried to mess with the baby’s substitute tubes twice more during the next few hours on the same shift.
According to what Letby said in court, the hospital’s policy was to wait and see if a baby “self-corrects” before stepping in.
On the other hand, a nursing expert named Elizabeth Morgan said that since Baby K was born 15 weeks early and weighed just over 1 pound, it would “not be normal nursing policy” to let her “self-correct.”
After being asked about Morgan’s statement, Letby said, “That’s her opinion,” according to The Guardian. “I’m not sure if it’s right or wrong.” I only know what the rules were in Chester.
Nick Johnson, the prosecutor’s lawyer, asked if the policy applied to babies as early as Baby K.
It was “for any baby,” Letby said. “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,” he said.
“No,” Letby said in answer.
Letby agreed that the child was given morphine around 4 a.m. and that at 6:10 a.m., a portable X-ray showed that the breathing tube was in the right place.
But the child became less intense again. After 15 minutes, Letby went into the nursery to get notes, just like the authorities say he did. Prosecutors say that the breathing tube had moved a fifth of the way in from where the doctor had put it after the child had been destabilized a third and final time.
“That’s because you pushed it in, didn’t you?” Johnson told me.
He answered, “No.”
Letby said that the only thing she remembered about the child was how early she was born. Johnson said that Letby looked for the family’s last name on Facebook two years after the baby left the newborn unit and ten weeks before her first police interview in July 2018.
“[Baby K was] a child who, I suggest, you remembered very well,” he said. Letby refuted the charge.
Letby was being questioned by Johnson, who asked her directly if she “tried to kill [Baby K].”
“Thereafter, you tried to create the impression that [Baby K] was habitually desaturating and dislodging her own tube, didn’t you?” He asked.
It was “No,” Letby said.
“Just like you tried to kill six other babies?” Johnson told me. “And you succeeded in murdering seven other children?”
“No,” the ex-nurse replied.
The Independent claimed on February 17, 2016, that Baby K was sent to a specialist hospital because she was born so early. After three days, the child died there. The government does not say that Letby killed her.
Letby’s trial will start up again next Monday. After the closing statements from both the defense and prosecution, the judge will start to summarize the facts of the case for the jury of six men and six women.
Source: FOX News
