In the five months that Jennifer Anne Hall was a respiratory therapist at Hedrick Medical Center, the rural Missouri hospital experienced 18 “code blue” incidents—an alarming increase in sudden cardiac arrest events for a hospital that historically averaged one of them a year, according to a police investigator.
Nine of those patients died, and nine recovered. Twenty years later, Hall was charged this month with first-degree murder in one of the deaths—that of 75-year-old Fern Franco.
Livingston County Prosecuting Attorney Adam Warren, who launched an investigation 10 years ago, said Franco died of lethal doses of succinylcholine—a relaxant that paralyzes the respiratory muscles—and the pain reliever morphine. The prosecutor did not disclose a possible motive or say why the investigation took a decade….