William Husel was a critical care physician who worked nights in the intensive care units of Mount Carmel Health System, a Catholic hospital network in Columbus, Ohio. In June 2019 a Franklin County grand jury indicted him on 25 counts of murder, one for each of 25 patients who had died between 2015 and 2018 after medication he had ordered for them. The prosecution held that the orders showed an intent to end lives. Husel pleaded not guilty and maintained throughout that he had been easing the suffering of patients who were already dying. In January 2022 the prosecution dropped 11 of the counts. On April 20, 2022, after a trial of roughly seven weeks and six days of deliberation, a jury of seven women and five men found him not guilty on all 14 remaining counts of murder and not guilty of the lesser offense of attempted murder.
The acquittal settled the criminal case and nothing else. By then the hospital system had fired him and 23 other employees, paid more than $16 million to the families and estates of at least 17 patients, and accepted a state pharmacy fine, and Mount Carmel West, the hospital where most of the deaths occurred, had closed. In May 2022, weeks after the verdict, Husel surrendered his license to practice medicine in Ohio, and the state medical board revoked it permanently. He then pursued his former employers in court, accusing them of destroying his reputation. That case ended in June 2025 when a judge took it from the jury and ruled for the hospital system.
Husel trained as an osteopathic physician and practiced in Ohio as a D.O., a doctor of osteopathic medicine and surgery. He joined Mount Carmel in 2013, and for the next five years he worked as a nighttime critical care physician at Mount Carmel West in Columbus. Mount Carmel was then part of Trinity Health, a Michigan-based Catholic health company, and described itself as the second-largest nonprofit Catholic health system in the state. Its hospitals also included Mount Carmel St. Ann's in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus. The question that ended his career began inside the hospital, in the autumn of 2018.
On October 25, 2018, a Mount Carmel employee filed a formal report raising a concern about patient safety in Husel's practice. The hospital did not act at once. Husel stayed on duty for weeks afterward, and three patients in his care died in that time. He was taken off patient care in November 2018 and fired in December. The hospital later accepted that the delay had been a failure of its own. In January 2019 its chief executive said publicly that Mount Carmel should have begun a more expedited process to remove him, and that the processes the hospital had in place had not been sufficient to prevent what happened.
Mount Carmel took its findings to the authorities. Detectives in Columbus received information in December 2018 that numerous patients had died under Husel's care, and the police and the Franklin County Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation.
The case became public in mid-January 2019. On January 14 Mount Carmel issued a statement and an apology. It said it had fired the physician and that an internal review had found he ordered excessive medication for patients in intensive care who were near the end of life. The chief executive called the conduct unacceptable and inconsistent with the values and practices of Mount Carmel. The system also removed 20 employees from patient care while the investigation continued, among them nurses and pharmacists who had carried out or approved the orders.
The numbers moved as the review went on. By February the hospital was speaking of 34 patients, all of whom had died between 2015 and 2018: 33 at Mount Carmel West in Columbus and one at Mount Carmel St. Ann's in Westerville. The hospital said it believed a few of those deaths had not been caused by the medication. By June 2019 the internal review had settled on 29 patients for whom it concluded Husel had ordered potentially fatal doses, and six more who had received excessive doses that likely did not cause their deaths, 35 cases in all.
The first wrongful-death lawsuits reached the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas within days of the hospital's announcement. They named the health system and Husel, and some also named the nurses and pharmacists involved. Families alleged that excessive orders had been given to at least 34 patients and that in at least some cases neither the patients nor their families had been consulted about the treatment.
On January 24, 2019, the Ohio Attorney General asked the State Medical Board of Ohio to immediately suspend Husel's license to practice medicine in Ohio. His office also asked the Ohio Department of Medicaid to end Husel's ability to provide services to Medicaid patients and offered investigators to the county prosecutor. Under Ohio procedure a summary suspension entitled the physician to a hearing within seven to 15 days.
The board suspended the license before the month was out. Husel did not practice again. The suspension stayed in force through the whole of the criminal case.
On Wednesday, June 5, 2019, the Franklin County Prosecutor announced that a grand jury had returned an indictment charging Husel with 25 counts of murder, one for each of 25 patients who had died over the span of his years at Mount Carmel. Husel turned himself in for arraignment and pleaded not guilty to every count. Each count carried a possible sentence of life in prison with eligibility for parole after 15 years.
The indictment did not reach every case the hospital had flagged. Prosecutors charged him only in cases where the amount ordered passed a threshold they set, reasoning that orders on that scale, outside surgery, could only have been meant to end lives. The prosecutor said the nurses, pharmacists and other staff who had been interviewed were being treated as witnesses, and he did not expect anyone else to be charged. No one else ever was. Husel's lawyers said he had never intended to kill any patient. His position, from the first filing to the last, was that he had been giving comfort care to people who were dying.
The criminal case moved slowly. The hospital's own case moved fast. Within weeks of Husel's arraignment, Mount Carmel had fired 23 nurses, pharmacists and managers and referred others to their state licensing boards. It promised new leadership and new safeguards.
The civil claims came to terms one after another. In April 2019 the system settled three wrongful-death suits; in one of them the family received $250,000, and the terms of the other two were not disclosed. By June 2019 Mount Carmel had settled seven cases and two other claims that never became lawsuits, for nearly $4.5 million in all, with individual amounts ranging from $200,000 to $700,000. More than two dozen wrongful-death suits had been filed against the system and Husel by then. In some of his own filings in those cases, Husel denied that he had negligently or intentionally caused any death.
State regulators followed. On March 4, 2020, the State of Ohio Board of Pharmacy announced a settlement under which Mount Carmel agreed to pay a $400,000 fine for violating Ohio pharmacy law and more than $77,000 toward the cost of the board's investigation of Mount Carmel West and Husel. The board had accused the hospital of deficiencies in its drug-dispensing policies and procedures and found that controls on automated dispensing machines had been overridden to fill Husel's orders. The operating license, by then transferred to the system's hospital in Grove City because Mount Carmel West had closed, was placed on three years' probation, and an outside consulting pharmacist or pharmacy organization was to review the hospital's compliance with the board's rules. Two pharmacists who had verified the orders were fined $2,000 and $1,000 and required to complete further training; a case against a third pharmacist over supervision was dismissed. At the same time 25 nurses still faced administrative hearings and possible discipline. Mount Carmel said it had built fixed limits into its electronic medical record, allowed overrides of the dispensing machines only in emergencies, and stood by the findings of its internal investigation.
Husel answered with suits of his own. He sued Mount Carmel and Trinity Health for defamation in 2019, alleging that the companies had spread falsehoods to the public and to law enforcement by accusing him of killing patients when their own officials knew that was untrue. Ten of his former colleagues filed defamation suits against the hospital as well, and some of them also alleged wrongful termination. Husel later filed further claims alleging malicious prosecution.
The trial was meant to begin in 2020 and did not. The pandemic closed and slowed courtrooms, the case was large and technical, and violence in the city weighed on the courts. In October 2020 the defense filed a motion asking the court to dismiss all 25 counts. It accused the elected prosecutor of misconduct before the grand jury, arguing that he had told the jurors that orders above the charging threshold were lethal when that was not true, and that the evidence he presented had substantially influenced their decision. The motion pointed to a patient outside the indictment who had received larger orders than many of the charged cases and had lived for more than ten days afterward. The defense said that case showed patients could receive such treatment and survive for days, and argued that the prosecutor had left it out of the indictment because it would have undercut his theory. The prosecutor answered that the defense should concentrate on the cases actually charged.
The man who had brought the indictment did not see it through. In November 2020 he lost his bid for re-election, and a new prosecutor took office with a new trial team. The staff assigned to the case changed several times over the next year. The defense team stayed the same.
The dismissal motion was argued at the end of 2021. On Friday, December 3, 2021, the trial judge refused to dismiss the indictment. The new prosecutors had argued that the defense had proved neither misconduct nor that the grand jury had been misled. The judge agreed with them and held that the defense's speculation did not meet the legal threshold for disclosing the secret grand jury transcripts it had sought. The case was set for trial in February 2022.
Six weeks before trial, the prosecution narrowed its own case. On January 20, 2022, prosecutors asked the court to dismiss 11 of the 25 counts. No reason was given count by count. The motion was presented as a way to streamline the trial so that jurors could concentrate on fewer and stronger cases, and the prosecutor observed that a court could impose only so many life sentences. The hearing itself was held to satisfy Marsy's Law, Ohio's constitutional guarantee that crime victims and their families be kept informed of proceedings, and the statements of the families affected were kept out of the public record. Husel appeared by video with his lead lawyer. The judge said he could not recall ever refusing a prosecutor's request to dismiss in his 17 years on the bench, and the 11 counts were dismissed. Fourteen remained. That same month a long-serving assistant prosecutor resigned with immediate effect.
Jury selection began on February 2, 2022, from a pool of up to 325 people. Prospective jurors were questioned about what they already knew of the case, about their concerns over the pandemic and about whether they could give up two months or more to a single trial. The panel was seated on February 16: seven women and five men, with six alternates. The trial began formally the next day, and the prosecution opened its case on February 22.
The State presented its case over five weeks. It called 53 witnesses: medical experts, Mount Carmel employees, investigators and relatives of all 14 patients named in the counts. Its experts testified that the orders far exceeded anything needed to control pain, and the prosecution told the jury that hastening a death is unlawful however close the patient may be to dying. The State rested on March 29.
The defense took a single day. It called one witness, an anesthesiologist from Georgia, and rested on March 31. Its case was that Husel had been giving comfort care to patients who were dying and had never tried to kill anyone. In closing arguments on April 11 the defense also accused the State of shifting the burden of proof onto the defendant at points in the trial, a charge the prosecution rejected.
On April 12, just before the jurors were brought in, the judge denied a defense motion for a mistrial. He then gave the case to the jury. He instructed the panel that if it found the State had not proved murder beyond a reasonable doubt on a count, it could consider the lesser offense of attempted murder, and he warned them not to find the defendant guilty of the lesser offense as a compromise. Two alternates were kept on the sworn panel. The jurors set their own hours. During deliberations they asked about articles cited by the defense expert and were told that articles not written by the experts themselves would not go back to the jury room.
By Monday, April 18, the jury appeared to have reached an impasse. The judge gave the jurors the supplemental instruction Ohio courts use for a deadlocked panel, and deliberations resumed. On the morning of Wednesday, April 20, 2022, the judge read the verdicts. On every one of the 14 counts the jury found William Husel not guilty of murder, and on every count it found him not guilty of attempted murder. He was 46.
Husel wiped away tears and embraced one of his lawyers. The Franklin County Prosecutor's Office issued a brief statement: it accepted the jury's verdict, and the jury had not been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of any charge put before it. A juror later said that the prosecution had not given the panel enough to find him guilty in a court of law.
Mount Carmel spoke too. Its thoughts, it said, remained with the patients' families. "It's never been our role to determine whether the defendant's actions in these cases were criminal," the statement went on. The system said it had acted on its concerns about the doses and had shared what it knew with the authorities and with the families affected. By the day of the verdict it had paid settlements totaling more than $16.7 million over the deaths of at least 17 patients. Nine civil cases had been settled and eight were still pending.
Two weeks after the verdict Husel gave up the license he had not used since January 2019. In a two-page letter dated May 5, 2022, he surrendered it to the State Medical Board of Ohio and acknowledged that he would no longer be permitted to practice osteopathic medicine and surgery in Ohio in any form. On May 11, 2022, the board voted to permanently revoke his license to practice in the state. Husel later said in court filings that the damage to his reputation was the reason he gave up the license, and that he had been unable to find work.
The verdict did not end the families' lawsuits, which turned on negligence rather than criminal intent. Those suits alleged that Husel had negligently ordered excessive medication for patients in intensive care and that nurses, pharmacists and administrators had been negligent in helping him or in failing to stop him. The law firm that brought 17 of the cases said its experts had been prepared to testify that the orders caused or hastened the deaths.
None of them went to trial. On November 17, 2022, lawyers for the families confirmed that the ten suits still pending had settled, eight of them brought by one firm against Mount Carmel Health System and Husel and two by another. The terms were not made public. Mount Carmel said it had made many changes to its care practices, that nothing was more important to it than the safety of its patients, and that it hoped the settlements would bring some measure of closure and comfort to the families.
Husel's own suit outlasted all of them. Trinity Health asked a Franklin County judge to dismiss it, and the judge refused, ruling that the case could proceed. It went to trial in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in 2025, with Trinity Health and Mount Carmel Health System as defendants. Husel sought more than $18 million. He argued that the companies had orchestrated a campaign to destroy his reputation.
The jury never decided it. After weeks of evidence the defendants moved for a directed verdict, arguing that Husel had not proved his case. On Monday, June 16, 2025, the judge granted the motion, ruling that the defendants' evidence was beyond dispute, and entered judgment for them without sending the case to the jury. Mount Carmel said it was pleased with the decision. Husel's lawyers said they were disappointed that the jury had been kept from deciding after weeks of testimony and that they were weighing every option, including an appeal. He was 49.
Four points of Ohio procedure shaped the case. A conviction on any single murder count would have carried life imprisonment with parole eligibility after 15 years, which is the exposure the prosecutor had in mind when he said a court could impose only so many life sentences. Attempted murder went to the jury as a lesser offense on each count, an option that would have allowed a conviction even without proof that a given order caused a given death; the jury rejected it on every count, and the judge had told the panel it could not reach that lesser verdict as a compromise. When the jury reported difficulty, the judge gave the supplemental instruction known in Ohio as a Howard charge and in many other states as an Allen charge. The grand jury that returned the indictment sat in secret, and the trial court held that the defense's claims of misconduct did not meet the legal threshold for opening its transcripts. The January 2022 dismissal hearing was held under Marsy's Law, which gives the families of the dead the right to be kept informed of the proceedings.
The central question of the case, whether any of the medication orders caused any death and whether Husel intended that result, was put to a jury and answered in his favor on every count. In law he is not guilty of the murder or attempted murder of any of the 14 patients named at trial. The 11 dismissed counts were never tried, and he was never charged in the remaining cases the hospital's review had flagged.
Other accounts of the deaths come from the civil and administrative cases, which were decided on different standards or settled without findings. Mount Carmel's internal review concluded that he had ordered excessive and potentially fatal doses for 29 patients; that is the hospital's own conclusion, not a court finding, and the hospital has said that it was never its role to decide whether his actions were criminal. The families' settlements were reached without trial and their terms were largely confidential. The pharmacy board's settlement concerned the hospital's dispensing controls and the pharmacists who verified the orders, not any finding about Husel's intent. Husel has consistently denied that he intended to harm anyone, and in the civil cases he denied causing any death negligently or intentionally.
The number of patients in the hospital's review changed during 2019, from 34 in the early weeks to 35 by June, 29 of them cases the hospital considered potentially fatal.
2013: Husel joins Mount Carmel Health System in Columbus as a nighttime critical care physician.
May 2015: The earliest death among the 14 counts that reached trial.
October 25, 2018: A Mount Carmel employee files a formal patient-safety report about his practice.
November 2018: Husel is removed from patient care; three patients in his care died in the weeks after the report, the last three deaths in the counts tried.
December 2018: Mount Carmel fires him; detectives receive information about the deaths.
January 14, 2019: Mount Carmel announces its findings, apologizes and removes 20 employees from patient care; wrongful-death suits follow.
January 24, 2019: The Ohio Attorney General asks the State Medical Board to suspend his license immediately.
Late January 2019: The State Medical Board of Ohio suspends his license.
April to June 2019: Mount Carmel settles its first wrongful-death claims, nearly $4.5 million by June 20.
June 5, 2019: A Franklin County grand jury indicts him on 25 counts of murder; he surrenders and pleads not guilty.
2019: Mount Carmel fires 23 nurses, pharmacists and managers and refers others to licensing boards.
2019: Husel sues Trinity Health and Mount Carmel for defamation.
March 4, 2020: The Ohio Board of Pharmacy announces Mount Carmel's $400,000 fine, more than $77,000 in costs and three years' probation.
October 2020: The defense moves to dismiss the indictment, alleging grand jury misconduct.
November 2020: The prosecutor who brought the case loses re-election.
December 3, 2021: The trial judge refuses to dismiss the indictment.
January 20, 2022: Prosecutors move to dismiss 11 counts; the court grants the motion, leaving 14.
February 16, 2022: A jury of seven women and five men is seated.
February 22 to March 31, 2022: The State calls 53 witnesses and rests March 29; the defense calls one witness and rests March 31.
April 11 to 12, 2022: Closing arguments; a mistrial motion is denied and deliberations begin.
April 20, 2022: Not guilty on all 14 counts of murder and of attempted murder.
May 5, 2022: Husel surrenders his Ohio medical license by letter.
May 11, 2022: The State Medical Board of Ohio permanently revokes the license.
November 17, 2022: The last ten pending wrongful-death suits are confirmed settled.
2025: A Franklin County judge allows his defamation case to go to trial.
June 16, 2025: The judge enters a directed verdict for Trinity Health and Mount Carmel.