Lucy Letby: the nurse on trial for murder of seven babies

The hospital had carried out a number of independent expert medical reviews into the deaths before calling in police, amid concerns about the neonatal unit’s high mortality rate. It found that “doctors had begun to note similarities in the deaths of the infants” and recommended “a thorough, external independent review of each neonatal death between January 2015 and July 2016”, reported The New York Times.

Opening the prosecution at Manchester Crown Court, Nick Johnson KC said the collapses and deaths of all 17 children concerned between June 2015 and June 2016 were not “naturally occurring tragedies”.

“They were all the work, we say, of the woman in the dock, who we say was the constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse for these 17 children.”

The prosecution also alleged that she wrote notes reading “I am evil” and “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough”. The passages were written on post-it notes following a search of her home, reported the BBC. Another said: “I haven’t done anything wrong and they have no evidence so why have I had to hide away?”

A medical expert told the trial that he noticed a “quite disturbing and quite unusual” pattern in the deaths of the babies Letby is accused of murdering.

Dr Dewi Evans, who was approached by the National Crime Agency to review the case in 2017, said “there were far more deaths than they would expect” and “collapses in babies that were otherwise quite stable, but in many of the cases resuscitation was not successful”.

Giving evidence at Manchester Crown Court on Thursday, Child D’s mother recounted how she saw Letby near her child in the neonatal unit, shortly before her child died. 

Child D’s mother told the court: “I was pushed in [to the neonatal unit], she was sort of hovering around [my baby] but not doing much.

“I would have expected her to leave us but she just stuck around and was sort of just watching, looking over us. I wanted to tell her to go away, to give us some privacy.”

The court was told how Child D’s parents were woken in the early hours of the following morning by a nurse “in a panic” who told them their baby was unwell. The parents were rushed to the intensive care unit where doctors were trying to resuscitate the child.

“We were just standing there looking as [Child D] was dying, someone was holding a phone to his ear, then a doctor told them to stop,”  she told the court. 

Outlining Letby’s defence, Ben Myers KC said Letby was a “dedicated nurse” and in “no way did she want to harm” babies. The court heard that she “cared deeply” for those she had to look after.

Reporting restrictions prevent the victims from being formally identified by the press. If convicted of the seven murder charges, Letby would officially become “Britain’s most prolific child killer”, said The Times after she was arrested.

At the beginning of the trial, Letby, wearing “a blue jacket over a black shirt”, replied “not guilty” to each of the 22 charges she faces, reported the Daily Mirror.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/94757/chester-hospital-baby-deaths-who-is-nurse-lucy-letby