April 10, 2015 (AlexSchadenberg.blogspot.com) — A nurse in the Czech Republic has admitted to killing 6 people with a massive dose of potassium in order to decrease her workload.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, Vera Maresova, 50, confessed to killing five women and one man over a four-year period at a hospital in Rumburk in the Czech Republic.
The Daily Mail article stated:
Dubbed 'Nurse Death' by local media, Maresova was initially arrested over the death of a 70-year-old woman last August, but has now admitted killing five more people between 2010 and 2014 following a police investigation.
According to the prosecution, Maresova injected the potassium straight into the blood stream of her six elderly patients, which caused them to suffer heart failure and eventually death.
All of her victims were already in the intensive care unit at the hospital and it is believed Maresova thought their deaths would simply be attributed to natural causes.
According to the Daily Mail Prosecutor Frantisek Stibor said:
'She is not insane and knew exactly what she was doing. Therefore she is fit to stand trial.
'She used her knowledge of medicine to cause malfunctions in heart rhythms which led to heart failure and death.'
The first murder was in January 2010 and was followed by another at the end of 2011.
In April 2012 she killed her third victim and three more between February and June 2014.
Maresova confessed to her crimes and will likely live the rest of her life in jail.
Maresova would not likely have been prosecuted in Belgium, where euthanasia was legalized in 2002.
A Belgian study in 2007 on the role of nurses in physician-assisted death found that of the 120 euthanasia deaths that nurses were involved in, 14 nurses admitted to lethally injecting the patient. Belgian law does not permit nurses to do this.
There have been no attempted prosecutions in Belgium for abuse of the euthanasia law.
Reprinted with permission from Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.