![]() ![]() Just as she’d told me when she and I first spoke in her trailer home in San Angelo in 1983 (“I haven’t killed a damn soul!”), Genene Jones repeatedly denied to her state captors that she’d ever harmed children under her care. ![]() Thus began the improbable second life of this byzantine tragedy. These infant deaths were now the coldest of cold cases. As the surgeon who presided over an internal investigation told me in 1983, excusing the hospital’s failure to alert criminal authorities: “If they’re sick enough to be in the pediatric ICU, they’re f-ing sick enough to die.” Key witnesses had since passed away memories had faded documents had been shredded-or disappeared. ![]() Proving homicide in a setting where children were already gravely ill had been too daunting a task for prosecutors back in the early 1980s. By 2012, she’d learned there was only one way to keep Jones behind bars: prosecutors would have to prove a new murder case against her, from the events that took place in the San Antonio hospital’s ICU. McClellan had appeared regularly before the Texas parole board, helping ensure that Jones wasn’t sprung even sooner. Petti McClellan, the little girl’s mother, was onto this before anyone. ![]() But a 99-year prison sentence, imposed on Jones at age 34, seemed to ensure that she would live out her days behind bars. Family members of her many other presumed victims, whom Jones had treated in the ICU, found this maddening. Yet, to that point, she had been convicted (in 1984) of murdering just one child, in a small-town clinic in the Texas Hill Country, where Jones had gone to work after the San Antonio hospital had quietly sent her off with a good recommendation. shift at the charity hospital where Jones worked in the pediatric intensive care unit, children were 25 times as likely to suffer cardiac arrest-and ten times as likely to die. By then, Genene Jones, licensed vocational nurse, was regularly described as “one of America’s most prolific serial killers.” She was credibly suspected in more than a dozen unexpected baby deaths and routinely blamed for “up to sixty.” An expert at the Centers for Disease Control later found that, during a fifteen-month “epidemic period” on the 3–11 p.m. The first edition of this book was published in 1989. It led me across the Lone Star State for four months, deep into a saga that would generate international headlines, a made-for-TV movie, my first magazine article (10,000 words), and a job offer that rescued me from law school.Ĭertain there was a larger tale- How had she gotten away with so much, for so long? What had driven her to it?-I continued reporting. I began reporting this medical horror story nearly four decades ago, at age 24, on a freelance assignment for Texas Monthly. The tale of Texas baby-killer Genene Jones-the children she harmed, the people who allowed it to happen, and the long fight for justice-bookends a vast swath of my life and career. An author’s note and exclusive excerpt from the book follows, with minor edits for clarity. An updated edition of The Death Shift, with chapters covering new developments, was released late last year. ProPublica reporter Peter Elkind began revisiting the events of his first book, The Death Shift- about nurse Genene Jones, a notorious “Angel of Death,” and a San Antonio hospital’s failure to warn anyone about her-in stories copublished with Texas Monthly starting in 2017. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |