Ex-Worker at Hospital Describes Probe

Hospital officials are investigating whether a “frowning face” drawn next to names on a list of failing patients was a signal to or from Efren Saldivar, the hospital worker who confessed to killing 40 to 50 people and then recanted, one of his former colleagues said.

Ursula Anderson, a respiratory therapist who worked with Saldivar on the night shift at Glendale Adventist Medical Center for three years, also said Friday that hospital investigators are focusing on a night when four people died at the hospital during Saldivar’s shift.

Anderson, who was fired by the hospital April 3 without explanation, said she was unable to answer investigators’ questions and believes that she and three other respiratory care workers let go by the hospital are being used as scapegoats and unfairly painted as participants in the alleged wrongdoing.

“I’ve never done anything wrong,” said Anderson. “I’m upset. I’m very upset.”

Anderson’s account of her questioning last month by hospital officials adds another twist to an already strange case that has prompted international news coverage and hundreds of phone calls from relatives worried that their loved ones had been killed by a man who allegedly described himself as an “angel of death.”

Saldivar told television interviewers this week that he “lied” during his statements to police, and denied killing anyone. He has not been charged with any crime. Glendale police say they believe at least one murder may have occurred.

Hospital officials reiterated that they were cooperating with police and declined to comment because of the ongoing investigation. Police declined to comment on Anderson’s remarks, other than to reiterate that she was being investigated along with the other workers fired from the hospital April 3.

Sgt. Rick Young, spokesman for the Glendale Police Department, declined to comment on what role Anderson is playing in the investigation. “We can’t confirm or deny anything,” Young said.

Anderson said that just days before she was fired April 3, she was questioned for more than an hour by an attorney and other investigators working for the hospital. Some of the questions, she said, focused on a frowning face that was drawn next to the names of some patients on an assignment board in the respiratory care unit that posted medical instructions.

Anderson said the attorneys wanted to know whether the faces--drawn with Xs as eyes and a tongue sticking out of a downturned mouth--were a direction from someone else to Saldivar.

The attorney “asked me if it was a sign for [Saldivar] to go see the patient,” said Anderson, 30, who has been a therapist for nine years.

Anderson, who interpreted the symbol as a gallows humor signal that a patient had died, said attorneys also asked whether the symbol was left by Saldivar as a signature mark to show that he had “paid that person a visit.”

“I just thought it meant that someone had died,” Anderson said.

Hospital investigators also asked her whether she could remember a night when four people died during the shift she shared with Saldivar. Anderson said she did not.

She said the hospital investigators also queried her on whether she knew how Saldivar was able to obtain drugs that he told police in his confession he had used--Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride. Anderson said respiratory care therapists at the hospital have no access to such drugs and that she believed if Saldivar obtained such medication, someone must have helped him.

“There’s no way we could get those sort of meds,” she said.

Saldivar first came under suspicion after hospital officials received a tip in April 1997. A statistical investigation cleared him, though the hospital assigned three employees to monitor Saldivar’s activities.

The most recent investigation began after the hospital received another tip in February, which it turned over to police.

Anderson said she believes she is the original source for the February tip. She said she told a friend about an incident involving Saldivar in which a patient was accidentally overmedicated, causing a near-death reaction. She thinks the friend later told hospital officials. Anderson said she didn’t tell her supervisors because the patient later revived and fully recovered.

That account contrasts with a police affidavit that says a tipster indicated that Saldivar had “helped a patient die fast” on Feb. 16, 1998. Police declined to confirm who was the source of the tip.

Police questioned Anderson briefly at the hospital, then more extensively 10 days later, when they tape-recorded her statement, she said.

She did say that hospital nurses sometimes joked about how their patients would die when Saldivar was around, but said that she took the comments merely as more of the dark humor common among professionals who work around death.

“I thought it was just a joke,” she said.

Anderson was fired April 3 along with three other hospital workers, who she said all worked on the night shift with Saldivar at one time or another.

She said she thinks she was fired because she didn’t report the rumors she heard to her superiors. That, she thinks, is unfair.

“I never harmed any patients. I loved my work,” Anderson said.