Katharina Buczek
“She texted an off-duty colleague saying that she, Lucy Letby, wanted to be in room one. She said it would be cathartic for her; it would help her wellbeing to see a living baby in the space previously occupied by a dead baby– Child A– a baby who had died a few days earlier,” Johnson told the court.
“But the shift leader had put her in room three. So she did not like it.”
And sadly, Child C did not make it. Instead, the baby boy was pronounced dead at about 6:00 a.m. the following morning on June 14.
The hospital’s consultant pathologist had declared Child C’s cause of death to be “widespread hypoxic/ischaemic damage to the heart/myocardium due to lung disease” at the time.
However, Johnson detailed how Child C’s vocal cords were “swollen” and how the independent medical experts who reviewed Child C’s case found that infection did not “adequately explain” the boy’s collapse.
Rather, one doctor stated that the “only feasible mechanism” for the amount of excess air in the gut of Child C was the intentional injection of air through the nasal gastric tube.
“This was a variation– or refinement– of a theme Lucy Letby had started with Children A and B,” Johnson said.
The jury was then shown a diagram that explained how inflating an infant’s stomach with excess milk or air could cause them to stop breathing.
“If you are trying to murder a child in a neonatal unit, it’s a fairly effective way of doing it since it does not really leave much of a trace,” Johnson noted.
However, when Lucy was interviewed in 2018 regarding Child C’s death, she claimed she had nothing to do with any of Child C’s care aside from his resuscitation. Lucy also denied ever being the staff member who discovered Child C’s deteriorating condition– even though her texts placed her by Child C’s bedside.
Then, one year later, Lucy went back on her previous statement and agreed that she had, in fact, been the nurse in the room when Child C collapsed.
