Nurse On Trial for Veteran Deaths

Monday, November 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) â€” A nurse murdered four patients at a veterans hospital because she liked the thrill of medical emergencies and wanted to impress her boyfriend, a prosecutor said in opening statements Monday. He also said she confessed to the boyfriend.

Kristen Gilbert could face the death penalty in the federal trial.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Welch showed pictures of each of the four men â€” including one of Stanley Jagodowski in a wheelchair with two grandchildren on his lap. He said each man had a normal heart when he entered the intensive care unit and Gilbert tried to cover her tracks by falsifying medical reports.

Gilbert, 33, of Setauket, N.Y., is accused of four murders and three attempts at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton.

Welch said Gilbert didn't like to work hard, but was ``very, very smart'' and the one area in which she excelled was in codes, or medical emergencies.

She liked emergencies because they attracted attention from her peers and from James Perrault, her boyfriend who worked as a hospital security guard, the prosecutor said.

He said Gilbert confessed to the attacks to Perrault and to her ex-husband. He quoted her as telling Perrault, ``I did it! I did it! You wanted to know? I killed all those guys by injection.''

Standing before a blackboard with each patient's name and date of death, Welch showed the jury a vial of adrenaline and said Gilbert ``transformed this drug from a drug of life into a drug of death, solely for her own personal, selfish pleasures.''

Adrenaline is usually used to control heartbeat, but used incorrectly can make the heart race.

Gilbert's lawyers have said the patients, who were in the hospital for treatment of serious illnesses, died of natural causes.

In a potential weakness in his case, Welch acknowledged that two important prosecution witnesses, two other nurses, were drug abusers at the time of the deaths.

The defense is expected to suggest they may have stolen adrenaline missing from the ward. Some drug abusers take adrenaline to enhance performance or for other effects.

But Welch said it is practically impossible for so many patients with strong hearts to suffer cardiac arrests for no apparent reason. He said that is like ``lightning striking not once, not twice, not three times, but multiple times ... in the same ward â€” and all following this defendant.''

Massachusetts hasn't had a state death penalty since 1984, when the state's highest court banned executions. But because the veterans' deaths happened on federal property, federal prosecutors brought a death penalty case in federal court.

``There's something deeply unsettling about seeing a federal capital trial in a state that has said `no' to that,'' said Ann Lambert, a lawyer for the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU opposes the death penalty.

There are prisoners on federal death row, but there have been no executions for 37 years.

After five weeks of sifting through about 600 initial candidates, defense and government lawyers on Friday settled on a jury of nine women, three men and six women alternates.

If jurors do convict Gilbert of murder, they must decide in a separate penalty phase whether to order her put to death.

Gilbert was convicted earlier for phoning an anonymous bomb threat to the hospital during the investigation of the deaths. She served 15 months.