Pennsylvania Nurse Enters A Guilty Plea To The Murder Of Victims Who Received Fatal Insulin Dosages

By Kaushiki Last updated May 3, 2024 Share with new partner:

On Thursday, a Pennsylvania nurse entered a guilty plea. According to the prosecution, the nurse gave nursing home patients excessive quantities of insulin, causing 17 of them to pass away.

Heather Pressdee, the nurse at Quality Life Services, a skilled care home in Chicora, was accused last May of killing two patients and hurting a third. After prosecutors claimed she had admitted to trying to kill 19 other people at various locations where she worked, she was slammed with further counts months later.

According to the state attorney general’s office, Pressdee reportedly abused a total of 22 patients—some of them were diabetic and others were not—by giving them dangerously high insulin doses at various facilities between 2020 and 2023.

First-degree murder, attempted murder, and neglect of a care-dependent individual are among the charges against her.

According to a news release from the attorney general’s office, she entered a guilty plea to three counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of criminal attempt to commit murder.

Numerous victims’ families have brought wrongful death claims.

In a legal lawsuit filed in March, Nicholas Cymbol’s family claimed that Pressdee “routinely insulted, berated, bullied and abused” him when he was a resident of Butler’s Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

Cymbol was characterized as a “brittle diabetic” with blindness, neuropathy, and anoxic brain damage. According to the lawsuit, Pressdee would obstruct other nurses from providing him with food or water and would disparage his brain impairment.

Additionally, Pressdee was charged with remarking that a different patient—named only as J.B. in a criminal complaint—would be “better off dead.” Before passing away on December 4, 2022, the nonverbal patient at Quality Life Services was admitted to the hospital twice for low blood sugar.

Attorney General Michelle Henry slammed Pressdee for using “her position of trust as a means to poison patients who depended on her for care.”

“I offer my sincere sympathy to all who have suffered at this defendant’s hands,” Henry said in a statement.

Attorney Robert N. Peirce, who represents five families, said in a statement Thursday: “On behalf of all our clients, we are optimistic the resolution of the criminal case will help alleviate some of their suffering.”

In a probable cause affidavit, troubling information about the case was detailed. These included purported texts that Pressdee wrote to her mother in which she expressed her desire to harm someone.

“Can I kill this man at Taco Bell,” one alleged text from April 6, 2022, read.

“I’m gonna murder already,” another one read, dated June 10, 2022.

She talked about her coworkers and patients in other texts.

Pressdee is said to have texted her mother on September 2, 2022, threatening to “murder my aides.” A few days later, she complained in a message about a screaming patient, according to the affidavit.

“I drugged him already and I don’t know how he is awake,” the message read.

According to the affidavit, Pressdee told her mother on May 12, 2023, that a patient was “driving me nuts” because he was following her.

However, the text message said, “But I may kill this resident.” “With him, I need to establish some kind of boundary.”

Pressdee was given three consecutive life sentences on Thursday for the first-degree murder counts, as well as a maximum penalty of 760 years for the crime of criminal intent to commit murder.

“This plea and life sentence will not bring back the lives lost, but it will ensure Heather Pressdee never has another opportunity to inflict further harm,” the attorney general said.