A former nurse has gone on trial for the murder of four patients at a Texas hospital in 2017, with the prosecution claiming he purposefully injected air into the arteries of people recovering from heart surgery.
On Tuesday, William George Davis, 37, of Hallsville, attended the first day of his trial, where he stands accused of murdering four people. The prosecutor called him “a serial killer” who, in the hospital, had found the perfect place to hide.
It is alleged that the former East Texas nurse slipped into the patients’ rooms, injected them with air, and left before any other night staff noticed what he was doing. According to court documents, four people died after experiencing “seizure-like symptoms.”
“No one expects this is going to happen to them – certainly not in a hospital … We’re going to ask you to find him guilty of capital murder, because that’s what he did,” Smith County District Attorney Jacob Putnam told jurors during opening statements.
The four patients were recovering from heart surgery at the Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas. Putnam noted that all of the alleged victims were in a stable condition after their operations, but CT scans showed abnormal arterial spaces in their brains after they suffered stroke-like symptoms. The defendant was the only nurse on duty at the time, the district attorney stated.
Davis has pleaded not guilty to capital murder, the only crime punishable with the death penalty in Texas. Phillip Hayes, Davis’ defense attorney, said his client was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that strokes are “not uncommon” among heart surgery patients in intensive-care units.
Putnam said the trial would take up to six weeks.
Davis was arrested in 2018, but the trial was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He will face the death penalty if found guilty.
