Guilty Plea Expected in Hospital Killings

A former doctor will plead guilty today to federal charges in the deaths of three patients at a veterans hospital in New York state, according to a prosecutor who plans to charge him with the death of a patient in Ohio.

Michael Swango is accused of injecting the three patients with toxins at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Northport, N.Y., in 1993. In two of the cases, he told hospital staff the patients’ families had issued “do not resuscitate” orders, the indictment said.

“He’s admitting to what he’s charged with and that’s it,” Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said Tuesday.

Swango pleaded innocent in July.

His lawyer, Randi Chavis, did not return a message left Tuesday at his office in New York state. Federal prosecutors in New York said Swango was expected in court today; a court order prohibited them from commenting further.

The nine-count federal indictment charged Swango with three counts of murder, one count of assault, three counts of making false statements and two counts of scheming to defraud, all involving New Yorkers.

A guilty plea to the three counts of murder would carry a federal sentence of life in prison without parole, O’Brien said.

Swango’s admission would lead Franklin County to charge him with aggravated murder in the poisoning of Cynthia Ann McGee on Jan. 14, 1984, at Ohio State University’s hospital, O’Brien said. Swango was an intern there at the time.

McGee had been a gymnast at the University of Illinois, where she was struck by a reckless driver. She was transferred to the hospital in Columbus where Swango worked in order to be near her parents, who lived nearby.

“This was the kind of thing he has done before that followed him wherever he went,” O’Brien said. “We had suspicions about all of the deaths. What we were missing is a level of evidence. We could not bring charges against him in the McGee case without an admission from him.”

Swango, who is in his mid-40s, also is suspected of poisoning patients in Zimbabwe, and he spent time in prison for poisoning co-workers in Illinois.