An expert witness who helped convict serial killer Lucy Letby has described babies screaming in agony, after being caused “extreme pain” by air injections.
Dr Sandie Bohin, a neonatologist and consultant paediatrician, was called as an expert witness for the prosecution during the ten-month trial after reviewing the cases.
Convicted earlier this month, Letby was sentenced to a whole life order for the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of six more while while working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Dr Sandie Bohin, a consultant paediatrician, realised the babies had been deliberately harmed— (Peter Byrne/PA Wire)
“Babies will cry if they are in pain, obviously, such as when you take blood or put in a drip,” she told The Sunday Times. “That hurts, and there’s no getting away from it. But to have a premature baby screaming is really unusual.
“What was described on the ward was babies screaming for up to 30 minutes. Somebody had done something to cause those babies extreme pain.”
Recalling the moment she realised the babies had been deliberately harmed, she said: “I was sitting at my dining room table in the winter, and it was dark outside, and I was looking at this baby’s x-ray, thinking, ‘This baby has had an air embolism.’ Then I thought, ‘It can’t be.’ I’d never seen anything like that in my career . . . but nothing else explained it. “The x-rays were in front of me, several of them, all showing air in the babies’ vessels. That’s when I thought: ‘No, it has to be, and it has to be deliberate.’”
An email sent to the hospital’s chief executive warned of chaos on the neonatal ward and that staff were ‘overworked’ (Jacob King/PA)— (PA Wire)
As well as injecting air into the bloodstream and stomach of vulnerable babies, Letby was also found guilty of deliberately poisoning a few with insulin.
Since sentence, it has emerged that a senior doctor at the neonatal unit had warned the hospital’s chief executive that staff were in tears as “they know that the care they are providing falls below their high standards”.
Staff at the Countess of Chester were said to be “chronically overworked” with services at “breaking point”, with the unit forced to look after more babies than they could safely accommodate.
The government announced an inquiry into Letby will be held, while Cheshire Police have been granted a further £2.4million by the Home Office to continue their investigations.
