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She’d timed it so her victims died when she wasn’t at work – because she dreaded having to deal with grieving family members.
Ayumi Kuboki (31), a former nurse at Oguchi Hospital in Yokohama, Japan, has been charged with the murder of two elderly patients, Sozo Nishikawa (88) and Nobuo Yamaki (88), in September 2016. The men, who’d shared a hospital room, died within two days of each other.
Kuboki now claims she’d only targeted patients who were “gravely ill” because she’d feared they would die during her shift, leaving her to deal with the families.
“It would be troublesome if that responsibility [notifying the families of patients’ deaths] fell to me,” she reportedly told police after her arrest.
Kuboki, who was arrested on Saturday, is being accused of injecting the patients’ intravenous (IV) drip bags with toxic antiseptic chemicals – the same kind used to clean the nurse’s station.
In their investigation police found 10 more antiseptic-contaminated IV bags with needle holes in the rubber seals among the 50 bags stored near the nurse’s station on the floor where Nishikawa died – the floor where Kuboki worked as a nurse.
Colleagues who’d been working with Kuboki since 2015, when she started at the hospital, expressed shock when they heard of the alleged murders. “She was the kind of person who was hard to figure out . . . but she was considered competent,” one said.
Kuboki was registered as a nurse in 2008 and worked at another hospital before joining Oguchi.
In December last year, while the investigation into the mysterious deaths at the hospital was was ongoing, Kuboki told Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, “I’ve worked hard to help patients die in peace, so I was shocked by the incidents.”
But police are unconvinced that Kuboki had only “helped” gravely ill patients to die – there’s evidence suggesting that healthier patients were also poisoned.
Kuboki has admitted to killing “at least 20 elderly patients” in her time at Oguchi.
Sources: theguardian.com, nypost.com, asahi.com, rt.com
