San Antonio: Driven by a desire to be seen as the heroic nurse who rescued dying children, expert witnesses said on Friday at the trial of a former nurse, Genene Jones (66). She was sentenced to 99 years in prison after being convicted of giving a fatal overdose to 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan in 1982.
She was suspected by prosecutors of having given fatal injections to between 40 to 60 infants and toddlers.
A district attorney on Friday said a new warrant was served against her linking her to a death of an infant. She has been allegedly linked with killing as many as 60 babies.
“She has been suspected in dozens of infant deaths, she has only been held accountable for one,” Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas LaHood told on Friday, according to a report by DC.
New evidence has been found to bring the new indictment charging her with the murder of then 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer in 1981, LaHood added.
When Jones was sentenced, she had the benefit of a 1977 mandatory release parole law. The law was changed in 1987 but did not apply retroactively, thus setting a March 2018 release date, LaHood further added.
“The possibility of this individual suspected of killing several dozen infants being set free was shocking to many, including the victims’ families,” LaHood said.
In 1983, prosecutors in Bexar County investigated 47 suspicious infant deaths at a county hospital where Jones had worked.
Law enforcement have said she may have killed 60 babies and toddlers. Many of the deaths were due to drugs that are difficult to trace. She was only convicted of killing one baby.
LaHood said Jones was emotional when served with the new indictment on Thursday night. She is imprisoned at the Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas, and is set for release on March 1, 2018, according to online prison records.
Witnesses told that several infants have to be saved when Jones worked as a paediatric nurse in the hospital in the 70s and early 80s. she became intoxicated with the power of life and death she wielded over children, they said.
Jones did not testify at her trial and her lawyers contended the injection was not the cause of death.
She was later convicted in San Antonio of injecting a then four-week-old boy with a potentially fatal dose of a blood thinner. That baby survived.