A baby girl was killed after a nurse injected air into her stomach three times and ultimately into her bloodstream over a period of three weeks, a court has heard.
Lucy Letby, 33, is accused of murdering the prematurely born infant at the fourth attempt during a nightshift at the Countess of Chester hospital’s neonatal unit.
Letby is on trial for murdering seven babies and attempting to kill 10 others between June 2015 and June 2016.
Child I, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, died in the early hours of 23 October 2015. Her death followed sudden collapses on 30 September and 13 and 14 October, the jury was told.
Dr Dewi Evans, a retired consultant paediatrician, gave expert evidence at Manchester crown court.
He stated that in his opinion Child I had been injected with air into her stomach via a feeding tube on the first three occasions.
But an “extremely disturbing phenomenon” of Child I’s noted “relentless, loud” crying before her final collapse led him to believe a different method had been used.
The first collapse was “out of the blue”, he told the court.
“She was entirely stable right up to the point of collapse.
“My opinion was that [Child I] had been subjected to an infusion of air. In other words, air had been injected into her stomach.
“That interferes with your ability to move your diaphragm up and down, and that interferes with your breathing.”
He told the court an X-ray showed an “astonishingly large amount of air” in her stomach.
Nurse Ashleigh Hudson told jurors about Child I’s “relentless” and “very loud” crying from her incubator at just before midnight the night before she died.
Evans said: “Ashleigh Hudson’s evidence was very moving because nurses and doctors know what a normal cry sounds like.
“Babies will cry if they are hungry, or if you take a blood test because it hurts.
“This was very abnormal. A different kind of a cry. I interpreted it as the cry of a baby in pain and in severe distress.
“That is an extremely disturbing phenomenon. There was no obvious explanation why she was crying relentlessly and it was very loud.”
Asked by the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, about his conclusion in terms of the cause of the fatal collapse, Evans replied: “I think she was the victim of air being injected into her blood circulation. This probably explains her crying and distress, and the failure of the medical team second time round to save her life.”
