In July 2003 a nurse at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, went to the authorities with a suspicion about a colleague in the intensive care unit. On July 6 a sixty-three-year-old patient, Adele Urbina, had died after a five-hour stretch in which her condition deteriorated rapidly and her nurse failed to take the appropriate measures. On July 16 the Maryland Board of Nursing suspended the license of that nurse, Coleen M. Thompson, thirty-four, and the hospital sent her home and, a few weeks later, fired her. Montgomery County police opened an investigation into whether she had hastened patients' deaths.
Prosecutors reviewed 211 deaths at Shady Grove during her time there. They settled on five, between 2002 and 2003: Harry L. Hancock, sixty-nine; Geraldine Baxter, sixty-eight; Lillian Vanzandt, eighty-three; Raymond H. McGivern, eighty-six; and Adele Urbina. Her job was to tell doctors of any change in a patient's condition and to follow their orders on medication, and according to Deputy State's Attorney John McCarthy she sometimes ignored those orders or withheld critical drugs. A colleague told investigators that she had probably turned off the intravenous pump attached to Harry Hancock before a doctor pronounced him dead. Another said she had tried to persuade a fellow nurse to let an eighty-six-year-old man on an intravenous pump die. "It wasn't her say to pull the plug," Hancock's widow, Diana, said.
On March 8, 2005, in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Thompson pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of second-degree abuse or neglect of a vulnerable adult, each carrying up to five years. About a dozen relatives of the dead watched. She wept quietly at times. The State's Attorney, Douglas F. Gansler, said she was not charged with killing anyone because there was no evidence on which to base such a charge, and prosecutors could not have proved that the patients, all of them seriously ill, died solely because of what she did or failed to do; they could prove that she intentionally failed to give the care her job required. In return for the plea his office agreed not to recommend consecutive sentences.
Her lawyer, Philip Armstrong, said she had at most been negligent because she was overworked in an understaffed unit, a claim the hospital's attorney disputed. "This is not a mercy-killing case," he told reporters. "If it was a mercy killing, she'd be charged with murder." The horribly callous fact, he said, was that all of these people were going to die anyway.
On May 17, 2005 she was sentenced to eighteen months on each count, with all but forty-five days suspended. The family of another patient, John Lieb, a cinematographer who died in her care in October 2002, had sued her and the hospital for wrongful death in 2003; his death was not among the five in the criminal case.
Five patients died, and the law could prove neglect, not killing. The surname of the fifth patient appears as both Urbina and Urbana in the reporting.