VA Case Suspect To Enter Plea

VA Case Suspect To Enter Plea

BY JOHN BARTON
News Police Reporter

The second of two nurses charged with murdering and poisoning patients last summer at the Ann Arbor Veteran’s Administration Hospital was to be arraigned today before a U.S. magistrate in Detroit.

Leonora C. Perez, 31, formerly of Ann Arbor, was taken to Detroit’s federal building this morning from the Washtenaw County Jail where she and her alleged co-conspirator in the case, Filipina B. Narciso. 30, of Ypsilanti, have been since Friday.

Mrs. Perez, who is pregnant with her second child, had been held [in Chicago's Cqok County jail since her arrest by the FBI last Wednesday, at the Lakeside VA Hospital near, her home in Evanston, Ill.

Perez appeared the next day before a federal judge in Chicago who set a $500,000 bond on the five counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of poisoning patients and a single count of conspiracy to commit murder.

But she had never entered a plea to the charges and that is the purpose of today’s hearing.

Narciso was arrested Wednesday by federal agents at her rented home in Ypsilanti and appeared Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Barbara K. Hackett.

In a firm, slightly accent she declared her innocence on the 16-count federal indictment that was handed down to end a 10-month investigation of mysterious breathing failures and deaths that occurred in the Fuller Road facility last July and August.

Despite arguments by her defense attorney, Thomas C. O’Brien, of Ann Arbor, magistrate Hackett refused to set bond for Narciso.

O’Brien, who also represents Perez, could not be reached this morning to comment on how his second client planned to plead at the afternoon arraignment.

It is believed that federal prosecutors plan to request Perez also be held without bond to await trial on the case.

Asst. U.S. Atty. Richard L. Delonis, the head of the 10-month federal probe of suspected murders and attempted murders at the hospital, predicted last week that a trial may begin in August or September and could go on for at least two months, if not longer.

Delonis will be aided at the trial by another Assistant U.S. Attorney, Mitchell S. Cohen.

The FBI was called to the Ann Arbor VA facility on Aug. 15 to investigate 51 unexpected respiratory arrests that struck 35 patients and may have led to the deaths of at least six men.

Investigators charge Perez and Narcisco, perhaps acting in a conspiracy with other persons, gave helpless patients deliberate injections of a powerful muscle relaxant, pancuronium bromide (Pavulon), to induce the breathing failures and cause the deaths.

Both women, who are citizens of the Philippines, worked in the hospital’s third-floor intensive care unit where many of the suspicious breathing failures and deaths occurred.

The Ann Arbor News has confirmed through sources earlier reports that federal prosecutors plan to show patients at the hospital were killed and poisoned as a macabre form of protest to hospital working conditions.

Neither Cohen nor Delonis will comment on the theory as a motive for the attacks on patients, but both have said they plan to prove a motive during the trial.