Man’s Violent Hospital Death Torments Family : New York: No suspects, no motive and no witnesses have emerged in strangulation of retired postal worker.

When the truth becomes too much, which is often, Marilyn Reid simply refers to Aug. 15 as the day her father “passed away.”

She hadn’t been particularly surprised that day when a doctor she’d never met pulled her aside and told her he had bad news about her father. After all, Victor Skelton was 83 and had already spent more than 40 days in a hospital with a kidney ailment.

“I knew he was old. I knew he had been sick,” said Reid, an assistant principal. “I was prepared.”

But she could not prepare for what the doctor had to say: Hours earlier, the retired postal worker had been found murdered in his hospital bed. A fabric arm restraint had been twisted around his neck.

The homicide was the first in a New York hospital since 1987, when a nurse dubbed “The Angel of Death” was arrested for poisoning patients in one Long Island hospital. He was later convicted in four killings.

No suspects and no solutions have arisen in this case. Several weeks after Skelton’s murder, detectives are stumped, hospital officials reticent, the victim’s relatives anguished.

“It’s not to be believed,” a tearful Reid said in her first interview since immediately after the events. “What’s the reason? Why?”

The crime scene--Room 818--is in the former Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn. Built in 1927, it once was considered one of the city’s best. Albert Einstein was a patient. Barbra Streisand was born there.

Today, the hospital, which merged with another in 1983 to form Interfaith Medical Center, is suffering. The building, trimmed with razor wire in spots, is surrounded by gutted brownstones. In recent years it has weathered a nurses’ strike, mounting debt and heavy state fines for inadequate medical care.

“We’ve had to go in there a lot,” acknowledged Wayne Osten, a state official overseeing a Department of Health investigation of Skelton’s death.

Victor Skelton spent his twilight years not far from Interfaith, in a brownstone where he reared two daughters. After his wife died in 1981, he passed the time watching his two grandsons grow up, and walking back and forth to a senior center, the barber shop and church.

On July 3, Skelton’s new doctor told his family his kidneys were failing. A bed was available at Interfaith. As she checked her father in, Reid found the place “very depressing.”

Her list of complaints grew with each visit: Her father’s room was small, dingy and had no call button; a day passed before anyone cleaned up blood splattered around the bathroom by his roommate; doctors moved him into the intensive care unit without notifying the family; a nurse once yelled at him for defecating in his bed.

After the last episode, Skelton called his daughter in tears.

“You have to understand my father,” Reid said. “He was so soft-spoken, a spiritual person. He never complained about anything.”

Reid considered moving Skelton to another hospital, but doctors gave her hope he would soon begin dialysis as an outpatient. She hired a private nurse’s aide to watch him during the day when she wasn’t there.

“The whole time he just kept saying, ‘I’m going home,’ ” she said.

For a time, it looked like he would. After a brief stay in intensive care, he moved into a private room and began feeling better.

Reid saw enough improvement that she and her husband, Maurice, felt free to take a weekend and move their son to Howard University for his freshman year.

“Take care of my dad,” she told the aide that Friday. She never saw him alive again.

Early Monday, before the aide arrived, a nurse prepared Skelton for dialysis, leaving him propped up in bed with the television on, police said.

Roughly an hour later, an orderly entered Room 818 and discovered the arm restraint knotted tightly around Skelton’s neck. Attempts to revive him failed.

The Reids did not learn about the death until they returned to New York and arrived at Interfaith. They were stopped on their way to Room 818 by a nurse who summoned a doctor unknown to the couple.

The doctor would tell them only that Skelton was dead, possibly the result of suicide, and that police were investigating, his family said.

“They clearly were not prepared for us at all,” said Maurice Reid. “Their first reaction was not about him, it was about covering themselves.”

Detectives told the Reids the obvious: It was physically impossible for Skelton to strangle himself because he would have blacked out first and released his grip. The medical examiner later ruled the death a homicide.

Interfaith is reviewing Skelton’s medical care and hospital security. Police already have indicated security was marginal at best.

Their investigation determined that the restraint had come from the eighth-floor room of a female patient, said one investigator, Lt. Peter Tartaglia. The woman, in the hospital for alcoholism treatment and sometimes violent, was briefly considered a suspect until detectives determined she was restrained at the time of the murder.

Police have collected forensic evidence and conducted dozens of interviews with nurses, orderlies, other patients and regular visitors.

The results so far:

No witnesses.

No motive.

No suspect.