Male Nurse Accused in Rape of 4 Unconscious Patients

A nurse was charged with raping four unconscious women in a hospital recovery room after they had undergone surgery, and 20 more women have come forward to say he may have attacked them too.

Bruce Alan Young, 45, was arrested Monday after a female nurse allegedly caught him having sex with an unconscious 15-year-old girl. Police said he told them he picked the girl because she was “helpless and pretty.”

“It’s alarming--we’re still receiving calls,” Inverness Police Chief Bill Vitt said Friday. “Some have said they were waking up and they felt this man doing things to them. They were totally helpless to resist.”

One of the alleged victims told the St. Petersburg Times that hospital officials did not take her seriously when she said she had been assaulted in August.

“They would just say I was on anesthesia and he was a medical professional, and they would make me feel like I was foolish,” the 23-year-old woman said. “But now that he has admitted what he did, I feel I’ve convinced people it wasn’t a dream or an hallucination.”

All of the alleged attacks took place at Citrus Memorial Hospital in Inverness, about 90 miles north of Tampa. Young has been a registered nurse at the hospital since 1990 and worked at three other hospitals in the Tampa Bay area.

After his arrest, police said, he confessed to raping the 15-year-old and the 23-year-old. On Wednesday, he was charged in two more attacks--in July and last year--after two women, ages 34 and 24, saw his photo in the newspaper and came forward.

At a court hearing Thursday, the short, blond and pudgy defendant shielded his face with a piece of paper as a judge set bail at $80,000.