Daniela Poggiali, an Italian nurse, was arrested last month for allegedly killing up to 38 patients because she found them or their relatives annoying. One of her victims, Rosa Calderoni, brought her crimes to light after she died from an injection of potassium. Officials suspect that Ms. Poggiali may have killed two more patients on the same day of Calderoni’s death.
Under Italian law, killing a patient through direct euthanasia with an overdose of drugs is illegal. Not that it would make it any better, but Ms. Poggiali didn’t claim that she killed her patients because she saw that they were in pain or were suffering. She simply didn’t want to deal with them anymore and killing was a quick fix.
Shockingly, Poggiali has received a stream of fan mail while in jail — and even a couple of marriage proposals.
“Over the last few weeks since she was placed here there has been a steady stream of letters from males,” a jail spokesman said.
“’Most of them say how pretty and good looking they think she is, and one or two have even contained proposals of marriage.”
Poggiali has denied killing anyone and insists she’s being framed.
Investigators said they found pictures of Poggiali posing with patients who had just died.
“’We believe she is sound of mind, but simply took satisfaction, and real pleasure in killing,” prosecutor Alessandro Mancini said. “The photos reveal an unbearable cruelty that I have not seen in 30 years on the job.”
Click here to sign up for daily pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
A spokesman for the hospital where Poggiali worked added: “She always came across as being a very cold person. But she also used her charms to flirt with male doctors if she thought she could get favors from them.”
Lead prosecutor, Alessandron Mancini said that Ms. Poggiali seemed “unperturbed” when she was arrested. He also said that police found a disturbing “selfie” of Ms. Poggiali’s phone showing her giving a thumbs-up in front of a deceased patient.
It was reported in the Italian paper, Corrieredella Sera, that colleagues of Ms. Poggiali overheard her saying things like, “Leave it to me, I’ll quiet them” and was known to be cynical and a vindictive nurse.
Mancini said, “I can assure you in that all my professional years of seeing shocking photos, there were few such as these.” He also said that homicide will be difficult to prove since potassium chloride is hard to detect after a few days in the bloodstream.
Additionally, Ms. Poggiali would deliberately give laxatives to patients at the end of the day so that other nurses would have to deal with the effects and she would sedate patients who complained about their treatment. It seems like Ms. Poggiali believed she had the right to do away with inconvenient or difficult patients.
Unfortunately, similar ideology to that of Ms. Poggiali is not unheard of in the medical community. Take, for example, infamous bioethics professor, Peter Singer, who believes medical professionals should be permitted to lethally inject Alzheimer’s “non-persons”, even if they never asked to be killed.
Click here to sign up for daily pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
As Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, explains in his article, Yes, We Have a Culture of Death, there are many examples of life threatening prejudices plaguing the disability community and those who are medically vulnerable.
Schindler writes, “Tragically, too many of us today have become disconnected and desensitized to our own dignity and intrinsic worth. It seems we no longer know how to love, and we place more significance and value on what a person can or cannot do, instead of understanding the value and dignity of the human person, simply because they are human.”
While some prejudices might seem “kinder” than Ms. Poggiali’s reasoning, they all lead down the same path; killing people because they are inconvenient or unwanted.
