Former Pennsylvania nurse linked to 17 nursing home deaths

A former Pennsylvania nurse accused of killing two patients with insulin doses faces additional murder charges and has confessed to trying to kill 19 more people in multiple locations, authorities said Thursday.

In May, Heather Pressdee, 41, admitted to authorities that she had intended to kill three patients under her care with doses of insulin, leading to her arrest on two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

Now, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office says Ms. Pressdee admitted to trying to kill 19 other patients with insulin at five different rehabilitation centers across the state as early as 2020 and as recently as this year. In total, authorities say 17 patients died under Ms. Pressdees’ care.

The new charges announced Thursday include two additional counts of murder, 17 counts of attempted murder and 19 counts of neglect of a dependent person.

Ms. Pressdee was arraigned Thursday, but it is unclear what plea she filed. A message left for his attorney, Phillip P. DiLucente, was not immediately returned.

The allegations against Ms. Pressdee are disturbing, Michelle Henry, the state’s attorney general, said in a news release. It is difficult to understand how a nurse, charged with caring for her patients, could choose to deliberately and systematically harm them.

According to the Attorney General’s Office, first-degree murder charges were filed against Ms. Pressdee only in cases where physical evidence was available. The 17 attempted murder charges were filed in cases where the victims survived an excessive dose of insulin or where the cause of death could not be determined.

She is accused of mistreating a total of 22 patients, ranging in age from 43 to 104.

One of the victims was Marianne Bower, 68, who died in September 2021 under the care of Ms Pressdees at Belair Health and Rehabilitation Center in Lower Burrell.

For two years, family members believed Ms. Bower had died of respiratory failure. Then, in September, investigators informed them that Ms. Pressdee had admitted to killing Ms. Bower, who was not diabetic, with insulin, according to Rob Peirce, a lawyer representing Ms. Bowers’ estate in another lawsuit for wrongful death versus rehabilitation. center.

“This is one of the worst cases we’ve seen of someone in the health care system going from one facility to another and, unfortunately, admitting to killing multiple people,” Peirce said at the time. of a telephone interview.

Ms Bowers’ family wants to know how Ms Pressdee managed to work at 11 rehabilitation centers for five years since 2018, Mr Peirce said.

Belair Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the lawsuit, staff members at the center began to notice that Ms. Pressdee was exhibiting troubling behavior and that the health of the patients in her care would deteriorate in unexpected ways.

According to the lawsuit, several staff members began calling her the killer nurse.

That same year, the state Department of Health investigated the center after discovering a pattern of residents showing signs of acute complications of diabetes, according to the lawsuit.

Ms. Pressdee told Health Department investigators that she did not call the facility’s doctor to attend to one of those patients, in violation of center policy. The Department of Health cited the rehabilitation center in August 2021, believing its residents were in immediate danger, according to the lawsuit.

Yet as the trial continued, the center did not investigate Ms. Pressdee further.

The criminal complaint filed Thursday by the attorney general outlines a history of disturbing statements Ms. Pressdee made over several years, both on social media and in conversations with colleagues at rehabilitation centers.

Witnesses told investigators, according to the complaint, that Ms. Pressdee disparaged people in her care and made comments such as, “When is she ever going to die?”

Prosecutors said in the news release that Ms. Pressdee typically administered the insulin doses during night shifts when staffing was low and emergencies would not result in immediate hospitalization.

If Ms. Pressdee felt that a victim would survive, she would take additional steps to kill the person, either by administering a second dose of insulin or using an air embolism to ensure death, according to the complaint.

Ms. Bower’s relatives were sick earlier this year when they learned of Ms. Pressdee’s confession, Mr. Peirce said.

The charges filed today do not ease that pain, he said. But they are optimistic that this is the next step toward achieving justice in this case, not only for their family, but for all the other families involved.