The verdict on Angelo: Murder found in 2 deaths

A Suffolk County jury yesterday found Richard Angelo guilty of second-degree murder for injecting two patients with a paralyzing drug, but found him guilty of lesser charges - manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide - in the deaths of two other patients.

The jury, which deliberated for 7 1/2 days, also convicted Angelo of assaulting only one of three patients he was accused of assaulting in a verdict that both the prosecution and defense saw as an acceptable compromise.

In interviews, jurors said they were split on whether Angelo was aware of what he was doing and eventually concluded he was not aware of what he was doing in giving the drug Pavulon to the first patient he was accused of killing, but later became aware of the effects of his actions - prompting the manslaughter and murder convictions.

Angelo, who was called "a monster in nurse's whites" by the prosecution, faces a maximum term of 50 years to life when he is sentenced Jan. 17 by Suffolk County Court Judge Alfred Tisch. The case boiled down to whether Angelo knew the risk he was taking when he injected patients with drugs that blocked their breathing so he could prove his worth by responding to the emergency call to revive them, according to seven jurors who were interviewed after court. In the case of three of the four victims, they decided he acted recklessly, thus supporting the convictions on manslaughter and murder.

"I've never in my life seen the stress that we've gone through," said one juror, Michel A. Loguercio of Mastic, after the trial was over. "For eight long days, all of us lived three lives: we lived our own and Mr. Angelo's lives, and the victims' and their families'. "

Angelo only blinked twice while he stared blankly ahead as the verdicts were read about 12:30 p.m. yesterday. The jurors showed more emotion as some of them wiped away tears.

Other reactions to the verdict ranged from apparent calm acceptance by Angelo's parents, Alice and Joseph - who sat in the first spectators' row in the Riverhead courtroom just behind their son yesterday as they did throughout the nine-week trial - to the delight expressed by a daughter of one of Angelo's victims.

The Angelos left the courtroom without comment. And Carole Scollo, the daughter of murder victim Milton Poultney, said in a telephone interview she wished Angelo could be sentenced to some of his own medicine.

Angelo's defense attorney, Eric Naiburg, declined comment on whether there will be an appeal.

"It's obviously not the verdict I was looking for, but it's a compromise," Naiburg said. "It was an adversary proceeding. It's not the verdict that Mr. Collins was looking for either," he added, referring to Assistant District Attorney John Collins. "But it's probably what justice demanded."

Naiburg, in his summation, had argued to the jury that his client did inject the seven patients in the hospital's special care unit with paralyzing drugs and may have caused some of their deaths, but that because of a mental disorder Angelo didn't comprehend the grave and unjustifiable risk he was taking with their lives.

To find Angelo guilty of second-degree murder by depraved indifference to human life, the jurors had to find that he disregarded the grave and unjustifiable risk to human life by his actions and acted with depravity. Second-degree manslaughter is recklessly causing death and criminally negligent homicide is failing to perceive the risk attached to conduct but taking action that is grossly negligent.

Naiburg asked the jury to return verdicts of criminally negligent homicide on the four murder counts, which they did only in the case of one victim, Frederick LaGois, whom Angelo claimed he accidentally injected with Pavulon.

And the jurors decided to find Angelo guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the case of the first patient he injected, John Stanley Fisher.

But in the case of two other victims, Anthony Greene and Poultney, the jurors concluded that Angelo had perceived the grave and unjustifiable risk he was taking with their lives and acted with depravity when he injected them with Pavulon.

Collins stood on the courthouse steps and said that he was satisfied with the verdict.

"I don't think he cared one bit for the people that he did this to. I think what this was all about was the [emergency] code and the rush of adrenalin that happens during the code and not the gratification of saving somebody's life, the gratification that comes from the situation itself."

Collins added, "In other words it's analagous to the volunteer fireman who sets the fire and then sits there and watches it burn and doesn't fight the fire and then ultimately gets involved in fighting the fire. He doesn't give a damn whether the building burns down ultimately but that he was able to participate in fighting the fire."

The seven jurors interviewed after court and by telephone differed on what they thought had motivated Angelo but said that was not the critical issue in reaching their verdict.

The key was whether Angelo was aware of the risk he was taking with his patients' lives when he injected them with drugs that would paralyze their breathing.

The defense psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Schwartz, had testified Angelo suffers from a "dissociative disorder" that gives him "strange kinds of separation from reality. " But the prosecution's two psychiatrists, Dr. Allen Reichman and Dr. Eric Block, disagreed, saying that they thought Angelo didn't disconnect the consequences of his actions from the actions until after he knew he was in trouble.

Initially, the jurors were split 6-6 on the awareness issue, and then broke down into camps of eight who believed that he was aware and four who believed that he wasn't.

"The mental health experts didn't help us out a lot," said one juror, Virginia R. Kacin. "All they did is contradict each other. " She added: "The point they couldn't agree on was when he began to dissociate, and that's the point that made it very difficult for the jury."

Another juror, Thomas Scelza, said that he was convinced "just from the beginning. I just couldn't see that he had blocked it out. The lawyers conceded that he injected people. They found Pavulon in their system and then the toxicologist's report showed that they died of Pavulon poisoning. The evidence was clear."

The split between the jurors was bridged yesterday morning after they listened to a readback of Gerolamo Kucich's testimony, according to another juror, Mary Malone. Kucich, the one victim who survived, identified Angelo as the bearded man in a white lab coat who gave him an injection "to make you feel better" just before he went into respiratory arrest, a terrifying experience that the 75-year-old Kucich described as making him call out to his mother and father for help.

That testimony, Malone said, "woke a few people up to the fact that Angelo was aware of what he was doing. "

Loguercio and other jurors explained they found Angelo not guilty of murder and guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the case of his first victim, Fisher, because they believed that at that point he was feeling inadequate and looking for a way to prove himself and may not have realized the risk.

But the jurors said they believed that as Angelo went on, he had to know that he was risking the lives of the patients he injected, Loguercio said.

In the case of the three alleged assault victims, the jurors found Angelo guilty of first-degree assault with respect to Kucich, but not guilty of any degree of assault with respect to Joan Hayes and Joseph O'Neill. Pavulon was found in the exhumed bodies of both Hayes and O'Neill, but the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's office ruled that both of them died of natural causes. But Angelo was convicted of second-degree assault in the cases of Fisher, Poultney and Greene.

"I believe he got O'Neill and Hayes," Loguercio said. "I'd bet the house on it. But the thing was that John [Collins] didn't really come up with enough evidence to prove in our minds that he did."