A 27-year-old nurse was sentenced to life in prison in Munich on Monday for the murders of two patients and six attempts on other patients. The man was employed mainly in on-call rooms at a hospital, where patients were seen after an operation. He injected non-prescription drug cocktails into patients. Two of them, aged 80 and 87, died after several days in a coma.
According to the court, he was also guilty of six attempted homicides, including three targeting the German essayist and translator Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, in November 2020. He survived these attempts, before dying of death. natural on November 24, 2022 at the age of 93.
Focused on alcohol
It was a nursing assistant who alerted the hospital management when he noticed the sudden deterioration of the patients. Blood tests later showed the injection of an overdose of drugs that had not been prescribed to them. The nurse would have acted to be quiet and to be able, in particular, to consult his telephone.
Focused on alcohol, he also regularly had a hangover or was drunk during his service. “As I was drunk, I had only one option: to silence them,” he explained during the hearing, reports the weekly Der Spiegel.
Similar cases
Germany has experienced several similar cases in recent years. Niels Högel, an ex-nurse suffering from “a severe narcissistic disorder”, according to psychiatrists, was sentenced in June 2019 to life imprisonment for the murder of at least 85 patients in total in two hospitals in Lower Saxony, region from northwestern Germany.
Between 2000 and 2005, he had caused cardiac arrests in patients chosen arbitrarily to then try to resuscitate them, thus hoping to pass for a hero to his colleagues. Investigators believe, however, that his toll could exceed 200 victims, many patients having been cremated. German justice also sentenced on October 6 to life imprisonment a former Polish home nurse for the murder of three patients by overdose of insulin.
