A serial killer Texas nurse has been sentenced to death for killing four patients after he injected them with air for fun following their heart surgeries.
William George Davis who is 37 years old worked in the cardiovascular ICU wing at Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas, where he allegedly killed four patients between 2017 and 2018.
The Smith County jury, which was made up of 12 jurors, deliberated for just under two hours before deciding to condemn the ex-nurse to death.
According to the reports, the jury believed Davis could be a threat to society and found that there is no evidence that would have stopped them from making their decision.
The sentence was announced by a District Court Judge, Austin Reeve Jackson, a week after Davis was convicted of the capital murders of Christopher Greenaway, Jose Kalina, Ronald Clark, and John Lafferty.
Davis who is from Hallsville, Texas was found guilty of the horrific killings on October 19 after he injected air in the victims’ arteries as they were recovering from their heart surgeries.
Doctors were puzzled as the patients’ conditions deteriorated after surgery. CT scans showed air in their brains and they reportedly suffered from unexplained neurological problems, according to The New York Times.
Doctors cited stroke-like symptoms and said that Davis was the only nurse on duty at the time. Smith County district attorney Jacob Putman during the trial said: “It turns out a hospital is the perfect place for a serial killer”.
Earlier in the trial, which began on September 28, Putman during opening statements said: “No one expects this is going to happen to them, certainly not in a hospital. injected
“We’re going to ask you to find him guilty of capital murder because that’s what he did”.
Jacob Putman
Over the course of the next month, October, prosecutors showed security footage from the hospital in the courtroom throughout the four-day punishment phase, which began the day after he was found guilty on October 19.
The videos showed Davis entering one of the patient’s hospital rooms. That patient’s heart monitor alarm sounded three minutes later and he died, according to reports.
Then on Friday 22nd October 2021, a phone call Davis made to his ex-wife from jail was also played. The killer said he tried to find ways to prolong patients’ ICU stays so that he could work overtime and make more money.
After admitting to the slayings to his ex-wife he also reportedly criticized the jury to his brother. The jury which was made up of five white men, one Hispanic man, and six white women
Prosecutors reportedly portrayed Davis as a “twisted serial-killer caregiver who enjoyed” injecting air into vulnerable patients when no one was watching and thus causing fatal brain damage.
Prosecutor Chris Gatewood during his closing arguments said: “Davis liked to kill people”
“He enjoyed going into the rooms and injecting them with air. If you watch the video on Kalina’s murder, he sat at the end of the hall and he watched those monitors and he waited. That’s because he liked it”.
Prosecutor Chris Gatewood
Meanwhile, defense attorney Phillip Hayes told the jury that the hospital had issues and that “Davis was a scapegoat” who was only charged because he was there when the deaths occurred, however, jurors disagreed.
Mr. Hayes claimed that the deceased patients all showed signs of a watershed stroke, which occurs when vulnerable border zones of the brain supplied by the three main cerebral arteries don’t receive enough blood, according to The Times.
Mr. Hayes also noted that they each had underlying medical conditions and suggested that Davis was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Davis was fired from his job at the hospital in February 2018 and was arrested in April after police learned that Davis was the only employee consistently around each of the four patients who experienced stroke-like symptoms.
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