Babies suffered for 30 minutes before being killed by British nurse, says expert witness

A paediatrician, Sandie Bohin, who gave evidence against British nurse Lucy Letby accused of killing seven babies and attempting to kill six others, has shared that the victims’ parents heard the babies screaming before they collapsed and died.

Lucy Letby was last week jailed for life for the murder of newborns at the Countess of Chester hospital in northern England where she was working.

According to a local media outlet, prosecution witness Bohin was approached by the police in 2019 as they probed the unusually high premature deaths of babies at the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester hospital.

Upon studying the X-rays of the babies, Bohin observed air bubbles in their blood vessels, a condition known as embolisms. “'I thought, 'It can't be'. I'd never seen anything like that in my career, but nothing else explained it,” she said.

Bohin said it was the air bubbles in the babies’ blood vessels that made her believe that someone had deliberately harmed the infants.

“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,” the paediatrician said.

Another media outlet reported that babies suffered and screamed in pain after Lucy Letby attacked them. “Babies will cry if they are in pain, obviously, such as when you take blood or put in a drip,” Bohin told the newspaper.

Bohin added, “That hurts, and there’s no getting away from it. But to have a premature baby screaming is really unusual," the report added.

The paediatrician said that she was told babies cried for up to 30 minutes and claimed that it was because someone had “done something to cause those babies extreme pain,” the report said.

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