generalspeaking

"That's The Way It Is"

"We will do our utmost to learn the truth."
"This case is like a house of dark rooms. We want to bring light into the darkness."
Judge Sebastian Buehrmann, Oldenburg, Germany

"They had everything they needed [to stop him] – you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes."
"I didn’t expect it [the mass murderer's quick confession in court] to happen today. We now have a chance to make some real progress."
Christian Marbach, grandson of one murdered patient

Niels Högel hid his face from the cameras in court on Tuesday   AFP/Getty

He was bored. And he wanted attention. And no doubt, respect. What better way to draw the attention of his peers and his supervisors than to demonstrate such devotion to his work than when patients went into a steep and swift decline he would be there at their side, desperately attempting to resuscitate them? The patients were in serious medical condition to begin with. Occasionally he succeeded, and those who survived represented the successful staging of his two-part agenda.

He would administer deadly drugs to bring patients to the cusp of death, then rush to their assistance to make an effort to draw them away from death's embrace. Most times it wasn't possible, and so that 130 or so patients whose untimely end he was responsible for, fell victim to his sometimes-successful ploy at heroic nursing. It was the price they paid for their vulnerability, for fate that placed them in a facility where this man, 41-year-old Niels Hoegel, was employed.

As the accusations against him were read out in court in the presence of some 120 family members of some of those whom his ministrations deprived of their lives, and as he admitted the accusations were correct, he added: "That's the way it is". And so it was. The larger pity of it was that those of his co-workers who observed the man behaving in unauthorized and clearly dangerous ways seemed not to notice.

Between the years 2000 and 2005 he was a busy man. He managed to destroy the lives of over a hundred patients at two institutions he was employed with. By administering deadly drugs like lidocaine and calcium chloride. And then coming to their aid, mostly unsuccessfully. It was, however, noted by authorities as well as co-workers that it was when he was on duty that people were losing their lives.

Prosecutors have stated that this nurse acted as he did, propelled simply by "boredom". The predictability of life? To which he inserted his own version of unpredictability; as in who would ever imagine that a nurse would make his life all that more interesting by giving the Angel of Death a helping hand? And he did, extremely generously.

The man is familiar with what awaits him; unending incarceration. Since he has already been a decade in prison, charged and convicted with six murders along with a few more attempts that failed to succeed. And receiving a life sentence for his pains. Once details emerged that Hoegel could have killed an additional hundred patients over those he was convicted of murdering, a new trial was ordered.

Grieving families agreed to allow their dead to be disinterred, to be tested for conclusive evidence. Some of his victims between the ages of 34 and 96 were cremated, so no exhumations there. More than enough were buried conventionally for the investigation to proceed, however. And he did, after all agreed that "Yes, what I have admitted took place".

Infuriatingly, staff who shared nursing duties with Niels Hoegel knew of irregularities on his part while administering his nursing duties. They did nothing. Perhaps they too were bored. When caught injecting the deadly drug cocktail in 2005 to one of his victims, there was no immediate intervention by hospital authorities. It was only when yet another patient was killed by Hoegel with the very same method that they finally acted.

And so, hospital responsibility in the deaths through lack of integrity and action is also being examined by investigators at the two hospitals where nurse Hoegel worked as he went about acting in tandem with the devil. And four of his former colleagues now face charges of failing to report evidence that might have prevented further deaths.

He was later seen being led to a police vehicle   AFP

Labels: Germany, Hospitals, Murder, Nurse

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 01, 2018