By David Young-
The alleged killer nurse was interrupted by the mother of one of her victims who paid her baby boy a visit at the neonatal unit, a court has heard.
Lucy Letby is accused of murdering five baby boys and two girls, and attempting to murder 10 other babies at Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016 in a horrifying case that has shocked dumb founded jurors.
Manchester Crown Court heard child E’s mother did not realise he was being attacked and was told by the nurse the blood from his mouth was due to a tube.
Ms Letby, 32, denies 22 charges against her.
The nurse, of Hereford, is accused of murdering child E and attempting to murder his twin, child F, the following day.
The court heard how the twins had been born prematurely and Ms Letby was the designated nurse for both boys.
One night, their mother, who was an inpatient on the postnatal ward, decided to visit her sons in the neonatal unit.
The jury was told the mother interrupted Ms Letby, who was in the process of attacking child E, but she did not realise this. Child E’s mother found her son acutely distressed and bleeding from his mouth.
Family members of some of the babies concerned in the case were among those present in the court as Mr Johnson opened the prosecution.
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He said the Chester institution was a “busy general hospital like so many others in the UK”.
However, he said that “unlike many other hospitals, within the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, a poisoner was at work”.
“Prior to January 20the statistics for the moratal unit at the Countess of Chester were comparable to other like units,” he said.
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“However, over the next 18 months or so, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses.”
Letby was interviewed in 2018 and denied she had had anything to do with Child C “other than during the resuscitation”.
Prosecuting, Mr Johnson says: “She said she had not been the person who had discovered the problem with Child C, although her texts put her in that room.”
A year later, Letby agreed she had been the only person in the room when Child C collapsed.
Less than 24 hours after Child C had died, at 3.52pm, Letby searched on Facebook for his parents. Given she had come off duty at 8am, “the timing may suggest this was one of the first things she did having woken up”.
Jurors heard Ms Letby is alleged to have tried to kill one child three times, while another died as a result of being injected with air.
Family members of some of the babies concerned in the case were among those present in the court as Mr Johnson opened the prosecution.
He said the Chester institution was a “busy general hospital like so many others in the UK”.
However, he said that “unlike many other hospitals, within the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, a poisoner was at work”.
“Prior to January 20the statistics for the moratal unit at the Countess of Chester were comparable to other like units,” he said.
“However, over the next 18 months or so, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses.”
Increases In Babies dying
He said the increases were noticed by hospital consultants, who were concerned that “babies who were dying had deteriorated unexpectedly”.
Medics also noted that babies who had collapsed “did not respond to appropriate and timely resuscitation” and that others “collapsed dramatically, but then, equally dramatically, recovered”.
“Having searched for a cause, which they were unable to find, the consultants noticed that the inexplicable collapses and deaths did have one common denominator,” he said.
“The presence of one of the neonatal nurses and that nurse was Lucy Letby.”
Mr Johnson told the court that as medics could not account for the collapses and deaths, police were called in and conducted a “painstaking review”.
“That review suggests in the period between mid-2015 and the middle of 2016, somebody in the neonatal unit poisoned two children with insulin,” he said.
“The prosecution say the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence you will hear is that somebody poisoned these babies deliberately with insulin.”
Among several cases detailed by the barrister, he told the jury that both babies were boys and both born as twins – but not to each other – and were poisoned within a few days of being born.
Mr Johnson said their blood sugar levels dropped to dangerous levels.
But the babies – identified only as child F and child L – survived due to the skill of medical staff who appreciated low blood sugar can have natural causes, he said.
“What the medical staff did not realise was that in both cases, was the result of someone poisoning them with insulin,” he added.
The prosecutor said nobody would think somebody would be trying to kill babies in a neonatal unit.
“There’s a very restricted number of people who could have been the poisoner, because entry to a neonatal unit is closely restricted,” he said.
“Lucy Letby was on duty when both were poisoned and we allege she was the poisoner,” Mr Johnson said.
He said both of the twins had a baby brother, child E and child M, who were both also allegedly attacked by Ms Letby – one of which did not survive.
The court heard one of the means by which the child E was killed and child M was harmed, was by having air injected into the bloodstream – what the doctors call an air embolus.
He said all the deaths and collapses were “no accident” and were not “naturally-occurring tragedies”.
Mr Johnson said sometimes babies were injected with air and on other occasions they were fed with insulin or too much milk.
He told the court: “So varying means by which these babies were attacked, but the constant presence when they were fatally attacked or collapsed catastrophically was Lucy Letby.”
Jurors were shown a chart showing nurses who were present on duty when the alleged criminal incidents were said to have taken place.
Pointing out, as examples, the first three alleged offences in time he said the chart showed the only person that was present on all three occasions was the defendant.
Mr Johnson said: “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we say, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.
“Many of the events in this case occurred on the night shifts.
“When upon Lucy Letby was moved on to day shifts, the collapses and deaths moved to the day shifts.
“They were all the work 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.”
Mr Johnson alleged that in some cases, Ms Letby tried to kill the same baby more than once.
“Sometimes a baby that she succeeded in killing she did not manage to kill the first time she tried, or even the second time, and in one case even the third time.”
The court heard how Ms Letby studied for her nursing degree at the University of Chester and had qualified a few years before the alleged events.
She worked throughout the period in consideration at the neonatal unit and was living in Chester at the time.
The trial continues.
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