A 34-year-old lady who worked as a nurse previously at a hospital in Yokohama has got life imprisonment on Tuesday for the murder of three patients. The victims were terminally ill, and she injected disinfectant into the drip bag of their IV drip.
According to Fuji TV, the Yokohama District Court handed down the ruling against Ayumi Kuboki, who admitted guilt at the beginning of the trial. However, prosecutors were aiming for the death penalty.
Kuboki accepts murdering Nobuo Yamaki and Sozo Nishikawa, both 88 years in age, who were in the same ward for terminal care in the Oguchi Hospital along with 78-year-old Asae Okitsu.
The whole incident took place in a recently renamed Yokohama Hajime Hospital. She worked there for two years, 2015 to 2017. The victims passed away in the hospital between July and September 20th, 2016. In this interval, 48 patients died, including five patients in a single day in August and four deaths on the same day in September. However, Kuboki has only admitted to the deaths of three patients.
Kuboki admitted injecting disinfectant into the drips of patients so that they could die while she was not on duty. She informed officers that if patients passed away when she wasn’t at work, she would not have to endure the agony of discussing their death with grieving family members.
Kuboki attended a psychological assessment for three months following her arrest. Even though she had symptoms of being autistic, she was mentally competent to stand trial. However, she was a suspect of 20 deaths during her initial arrest as all of them died around the time.
Source: Japantoday
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