Testimony Date Set In VA Investigation

Testimony Date Set In VA Investigation

BY JOHN BARTON News Staff Reporter

A secret session to take sworn testimony from a dying man federal investigators say is a key witness in the Ann Arbor Veteran's Administration Hospital murder probe is to take place April 22.

The date of the unprecedented legal proceeding in which Richard Neely, 61. of Osceola, Ind., is to recount an alleged attempt on his life while he was a patient at the VA facility, was disclosed in a legal brief filed today in U.S. District court in Detroit.

The brief, an appeal of a federal judge’s decision handed down last month to allow prosecutors to take Neely's testimony, was presented by Ann Arbor lawyer Thomas C. O’Brien.

O’Brien represents two nurses named by the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI as suspects in a series of mysterious, sudden breathing failures that occurred at the hospital during a six-week period last July and August.

Some 20 of the 51 respiratory arrests experienced by 15 patients have been termed by medical investigators as “highly suspicious.” As many as six patients may have died from the breathing failures which investigators believe were caused by deliberate injections of a muscle-paralyzing drug, pancuronium bromide (Pavulon).

The investigation has focused on O’Brien clients, Filipina Narciso, 29, of Ypsilanti, and Leonora Perez, 31, who now lives near Chicago. Both women were nurses in the Fuller Road hospital’s intensive care unit where many of the most suspicious breathing failures occurred.

Neely, whose testimony had been sought by the head of the murder probe, Asst. U.S. Attorney Richard L.. Delonis, suffers from bladder cancer and investigators fear he may die before the case can be brought to trail. He experienced an unexplained respiratory arrest July 30 while a patient in a fourth-floor ward.

Delonis won the right to take Neely's testimony in what will be a videotaped hearing shrouded in secrecy through a court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Philip L. Pratt.

O’Brien had strenuously fought Delonis’ action and today's appeal, which will be forwarded to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Judicial District in Cincinati, is a last-minute effort to halt the taking of Neely’s deposition.

Neely, according to court documents and investigative sources has identified one of O’Brien’s clients, reportedly Mrs. Perez, as a nurse he saw standing beside his bed when he suffered his breathing failure. When Neely began to feel the effects of the allegedly drug-induced respiratory arrest, investigators charge, the nurse ignored his pleas for help and vanished from his room.

The April 22 deposition will be taken somewhere in Indiana, presumeably near Osceola, it was learned. The entire session will be filmed on videotape. Perez and Narciso are expected to be present during the testimony and O’Brien will have the right to cross-examine Neely’s statements.

At the end of the hearing, the testimony will be sealed and deposited with Judge Pratt until — or if — the nurses are indicted by the grand jury and the case is brought to trial, Delonis said.