Nurses are often held in high regard for the work they did during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the rest of the world went into lockdown, nurses and doctors battled the coronavirus on the front lines, with some catching the virus themselves. But not all nurses are created equal, as one nurse in the U.K. demanded she was innocent on Monday after prosecutors accused her of murdering seven babies. Sadly, that was all as the nurse, Lucy Letby (32), apparently tried to kill another ten more children under her care in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The claims made against the nurse go all the way back to 2015.

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During opening arguments at the Manchester Crown Court, the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, detailed how, during 2015 and 2016, numerous babies died after being injected with air or insulin. Some babies were even given too much milk. Luckily, two of the children poisoned with insulin survived. Still, Johnson said there were “varying means by which these babies were attacked, but the constant presence, when they were fatally attacked or collapsed catastrophically, was Lucy Letby.”

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Nick Johnson continued, stating, “Prior to January 2015, the statistics for the mortality of babies in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester were comparable to other like units. However, over the next 18 months or so, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses.” He noted that the one common theme among the deaths was Lucy Letby. “The presence of one of the neonatal nurses, and that nurse was Lucy Letby.”

Alarms first went off when authorities started an investigation into the increase in infant deaths at the hospital. Believing it to be something else, investigators were stunned by what they found. Johnson explained to the box of jurors, “Lucy Letby was on duty when both were poisoned, and we allege she was the poisoner. There’s a very restricted number of people who could have been the poisoner, because entry to a neonatal unit is closely restricted. The collapses of all 17 children concerned were not ‘naturally occurring tragedies. They were all the work, we say, of the woman in the dock, who we say was the constant, malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse for these 17 children.”

This isn’t the first time Lucy Letby has been at the center of such claims. In 2018, she was arrested for suspicion but eventually let go due to “pending inquiries.” As of now, Letby faces seven counts of murder and another 15 counts of attempted murder. While open arguments continue, the court believes the entire hearing will take up to six months.