Probe of Hospice Deaths Focuses on Nurse : Medicine: Investigators seek to determine whether the woman gave lethal doses of morphine to 17 patients. A lawyer for her employer says the accusations are unfounded and sensationalized.

Investigators trying to determine whether a home-care nurse gave up to 17 hospice patients fatal doses of morphine have exhumed at least one body and broadened their search to involve four law-enforcement agencies in San Bernardino County, officials said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the San Bernardino Police Department said the inquiry originated three weeks ago after co-workers approached authorities with suspicions about the deaths of nurse Darlene Leon’s clients.

In a television news report that aired Monday, co-workers were said to be calling Leon, 49, the “angel of death.”

Lt. Dan Wylde of the Rialto Police Department said Tuesday he and representatives of police departments in Fontana and San Bernardino were recently summoned to a series of meetings with the San Bernardino County coroner, which is spearheading the inquiry.

The coroner’s office exhumed a body on Monday, and other exhumations may follow, Wylde said. Officials from the coroner’s office declined comment Tuesday but will hold a news conference today in San Bernardino.

Wylde confirmed that the deaths in question occurred between September, 1992, and last February and involved terminal patients who lived throughout the Inland Empire.

“If they determine something further--if, indeed, foul play was involved--the various agencies will be called in to do a homicide investigation,” he said. “But right now, as far as I’m concerned, we haven’t yet had a homicide. Until we know something more, we’re not investigating a homicide.”

Jim Hamlin, spokesman for the San Bernardino Police Department, said Tuesday the investigation had widened to include the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and that some victims may have lived in Riverside County.

Leon, who until recently worked for the Claremont-based Visiting Nurses Assn. of Pomona-San Bernardino, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. But officials for the agency said she was licensed to inject patients with morphine and had done so repeatedly under doctors’ orders.

David Call, the association’s attorney, disputed the notion that Leon or any other nurse working with the association had done anything improper.

“As far as we’re concerned, she’s not the Dr. (Jack) Kevorkian of the West Coast,” he said, referring to the Michigan physician who has lost his medical license in two states for assisting suicides of ailing patients.

Call confirmed that the agency is cooperating with the coroner’s office.

The attorney blamed the inquiry on “whistle-blowers” whose identities and motives he declined to reveal, except to say that they were not the relatives of patients who have died.

“Who knows how these things get started?” he said. “Somebody who needs psychiatric care goes into a cemetery and says, ‘Everybody in here is dead. Let’s have an investigation.’ ”

He scoffed at Leon being called the “angel of death,” and said that no one at the agency had ever heard the term except on KNBC-TV, which attributed the term to unnamed co-workers of the nurse.

“What we’re talking about here is the sensationalism of death,” attorney Call said. “We’re interested in stopping all of this nonsense and getting back to helping people who are trying to deal with death.”

To note that 17 of Leon’s patients have died, Call said, is like saying that “every person a mortician has cared for has died. Ninety-nine percent of the people under hospice care are on morphine, which a doctor prescribes. So, here’s a bunch of people in pain, about to die, and all of a sudden, people are saying this woman (Leon) accelerated the process.

“All I know is that everyone who had anything to do with (Leon) loved her and respected her,” Call said.

The nurses association is linked to similar organizations throughout the country, Call said, and serves about 40 patients who are terminally ill. It employs more than 200 nurses on a full- or part-time basis.

“All of the patients who request our services are terminally ill with a life expectancy of six months or less,” he said. “So there’s a portion of patients who just aren’t going to make it.”