Ex-Hospital Worker Charged in 6 Deaths

Former respiratory therapist Efren Saldivar was formally charged Wednesday with six counts of murder, which could carry the death penalty, for allegedly injecting the paralyzing drug Pavulon into elderly patients at Glendale Adventist Medical Center over an eight-month period.

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said his office will not decide whether to seek that penalty against Saldivar--for the special circumstance of “multiple murder”--until after a preliminary hearing.

In addition to the murder charges, covering deaths from December 1996 to August 1997, Saldivar was charged with receiving stolen property--the sleep inducing drug Versed. The drug had been among the items seized in a search of Saldivar’s Tujunga home nearly three years ago, on the day after Saldivar told police that he had killed as many as 50 patients at the Glendale hospital with paralyzing drugs. Cooley said the Versed’s significance as “new evidence” was recognized only after he ordered a review of the 34-month-old investigation when he took office last month.

“The fresh eyes that looked at the case saw something that wasn’t seen before,” Cooley said.

Saldivar is charged with the murders of :

* Salbi Asatryan, 75. Admitted to the hospital Dec. 27, 1996. Died Dec. 30, 1996.

* Eleanora Schlegel, 77. Admitted Dec. 30, 1996. Died Jan. 2, 1997.

* Jose Alfaro, 82. Admitted on Jan. 2, 1997. Died Jan. 4.

* Luina Schidlowski, 87. Admitted Jan. 20, 1997. Died Jan. 22.

* Balbino Castro, 87. Admitted Aug. 6, 1997. Died Aug. 15

* Myrtle Brower, 84. Admitted Aug. 18, 1997. Died Aug. 28.

After filing the charges, law enforcement officials said they did not believe that other respiratory therapists joined Saldivar in killing patients.

“My best information is he did this alone,” said Glendale Police Chief Russell Siverling.

Saldivar, 31, is scheduled to be arraigned this morning in Glendale Superior Court. But Assistant Public Defender Robert Kalunian said his office may seek to postpone the proceeding after being asked to represent Saldivar, who has said he is indigent.

Saldivar’s mother, Isaura Saldivar, 52, insisted Wednesday that he is not guilty.

“We don’t have to run away from anything. We have nothing to hide,” she said. “We will see in the end.”

Police focused their investigation on the 117 deaths while Saldivar was on duty during his last two years at Glendale Adventist. Looking for the deaths that seemed most suspicious, they eventually exhumed 20 bodies.

The charges show that the first four of the deaths classified as homicides came within a month, during a period when another respiratory therapist later reported hearing rumors that Saldivar had a “magic syringe.”

The other two charges stem from deaths in August 1997--the month that Saldivar, during his reported confession, said “he had injected a patient with a medication that caused paralysis,” according to a police affidavit filed with the California Respiratory Care Board.

Some hospital workers have identified the first of the six deaths-- of Asatryan--as the incident that prompted the other respiratory therapist to make the “magic syringe” comment. Yet Saldivar continued in his job for more than a year, a time in which he is now accused of killing the other five patients.

In a statement Wednesday, the hospital said that it was not told of the remark until April 1997, and immediately conducted an internal investigation “of medical records and respiratory staff activity, but found no substantive facts or evidence to support the rumor.

“Regrettably, two of the patients died,” the statement added, “after the hospital was already engaged in its own investigation.”

The hospital finally called police in March 1998, to investigate a new tip that a respiratory therapist “helped a patient die fast.”

Glendale Adventist spokesman Mark Newmyer said Wednesday that the hospital was now keeping “under lock and key” the two potent muscle relaxers Saldivar was suspected of using, Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride, treating them like narcotics.

But that is likely to be little consolation to the families of the alleged victims, or the other 14 families whose relatives’ bodies were exhumed as part of the investigation.

“We didn’t believe there was a person who could do that,” said Asatryan’s daughter, Odet Abramyan, who was notified by police on Tuesday that her mother is believed to have been killed by a dose of Pavulon. “If you could open my heart you could see how I feel, but I can’t explain it. All night I began to think that maybe if he didn’t do this, she’d still be with us.”

Families File Lawsuits

Abramyan and her sister last year filed one of the first civil lawsuits against Glendale Adventist and Saldivar stemming from the hospital worker’s alleged poisoning spree. But without waiting for the results of the police investigation, the sisters--and three brothers--settled their case against the hospital.

They received $60,000, Abramyan said, and had to give much of that to their lawyer.

The lawyer did not return phone calls for comment.

The second victim, Schlegel, was a Pasadena woman whose son said she had been recovering from a bout of pneumonia--growing strong enough to feed herself--and who had spoken with her family and doctors about going home. But her son said they decided it best to wait until after the New Year’s crush around Pasadena. “She had a bout of pneumonia, she went to the hospital and never went home,” Larry Schlegel said.

Alfaro was a former bus driver from the Philippines--and a veteran of the Bataan Death March--who came to the U.S. in 1992 to accept an offer of citizenship to Filipino soldiers who had helped the Allies in World War II.

Castro, a retired machinist, also was a Filipino immigrant. He came to the United States in 1980 and “thought it was like paradise here,” said his son Joel, 53.

Though Castro had long-standing breathing problems, and a stroke, the family was heartened when he was moved out of the hospital’s intensive care unit. Then they were informed that he had died in the middle of the night.

“Filipinos take care of their parents until the end,” Joel Castro said. “We don’t mind caring for them. We were still hoping he would come back.”

A great-niece said Myrtle Brower, a Van Nuys resident, was admitted to the hospital after suffering a stroke. Though she was not in good health, “I just feel like, whatever this guy was just doing, God should have done,” said the niece, Cynthia Oliver, 43, of Mission Hills.

“He shouldn’t have been playing God. When it was her time to go, God would’ve taken her. And that part I resent.”

Other families got the news Wednesday that the testing conducted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had produced no evidence that their parent or spouse had been killed.

Some continued to believe their loved ones had been murdered. Others spoke of the ordeal of living with the uncertainty.

Cooley suggested Wednesday that the testing process may continue. Now that the case has officially reached the prosecutor’s office, it can use its own funds for investigations or apply to the court for help paying expenses. Use of the Livermore lab cost Glendale nearly $250,000, the chief county prosecutor noted.

At a press conference announcing the charges, Deputy Dist. Atty. Al McKenzie, who will be handling the case, said Livermore “essentially invented a scientific protocol” to test for Pavulon, which is administered by physicians to inhibit natural breathing, often when a breathing tube has to be inserted into a patient.

Other forensic labs could conceivably test the same tissue samples to bolster Livermore’s Pavulon findings, or test for succinylcholine chloride, which Livermore could not find.

Prosecutors would not say Wednesday what other evidence might link Saldivar to the six deaths.

Asatryan, the “magic syringe” case patient, had lived in three countries: Iran, Armenia and the United States. She came in 1990, after her husband died, to join her five children in Glendale’s booming Armenian community.

Though she never learned English, she would joke about the big business deals she’d pull off if she ever learned the language, her daughter recalled.

Asatryan battled long-standing respiratory problems and was paralyzed from the waist down, her daughter said. She was in respiratory distress when taken to Glendale Adventist the last week of 1996.

The children had little reason to be suspicious when she died. Nor did they really seem to believe police would make a case when they heard in 1998 of the “angel of death” investigation, or the next year, when their mother’s body was being exhumed. That’s one reason they settled their case so quickly, without waiting for the outcome.

“We never heard something like that. We’re naive. We don’t know what will happen,” said Odet Abramyan, the 37-year-old daughter.

Despite the charges Wednesday, Abramyan said she would not favor the death penalty for Saldivar.

“I don’t hate the man,” she said. “I hate the things he did.”

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Times Staff Writers Jean Guccione and Twila Decker contributed to this report.