MONTEVIDEO (Reuters) – Uruguayan Justice ruled out on Wednesday that the nurses who murdered 15 patients applying them morphine and air over the past two years have done for piety, as they had been arguing in the interrogation.
Two nurses were charged on Sunday with prison by especially aggravated homicide in real repetition, after a police investigation of two months that began after the anonymous complaint of a colleague. A third person was processed by complicity.
"(…)Incorporated into the process test allows to deduce the intention to kill. “It’s nurses with vast experience in their profession who applied substances which quickly carried the death”, argued the judge, Rolando Vomero, in the indictment, which agreed in Reuters.
To the nurses Marcelo Pereira y Ariel Acevedo were awarded the deaths of five to ten people, respectively. Both played in the private Spanish Association, as Pereira also worked in the public hospital Maciel.
Defendants declared that they sedaban their patients from makes at least “a year or a year and a half” in a case and another from “a couple of years” to prevent them suffering.
“By intravenous means applied air directly to the path of the patient (…)” Not at random, it was patients in terminal stage. “In which he and the family, in my view, were in a continuous suffering”, said Acevedo during interrogation.
“my intention was not stop life, but let rest,” he added.
Authorities of the health units where working nurses and his colleagues declared that deaths occurred in patients who were stable and from one moment to another is descompensaron, always in the shift of the accused.
Added that the cases were not Terminal and that deaths occurred even in patients that the discharge had been authorized.
“the built-in test does not allow consider that we are to pious killings”, concluded the judge Giordano.
Counsel authorized the exhumation of the bodies of the victims and ordered a psychological expertise to the defendants, held in a prison in the interior of the country.
Murders serial committed by nurses, a case unprecedented in the South American country, Californian population.
La police received around 200 complaints from people who suspect that their relatives were killed by Acevedo and Pereira during their placement.
The Ministry of public health implemented a package of contingent measures which include the audit surprise of all units of intensive care from the public and private sectors to see if compliance with procedures and adequate controls.
The lawyer of one of the defendants told Reuters that not appeal the judgement. “Would be a daring with justice if it did, being that my client confessed to the crimes,” ended.
(Malena Castaldi report); (Edited by Ricardo Figueroa)
