PA Nurse Accused of Killing Patients Hit With a Wrongful Death Lawsuit by Family of Victim
The family of a woman who died in a Pennsylvania nursing home has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the nurse who cared for her and the center that hired the nurse.
Marianne Bower was 67 years old when she died on September 28, 2021, at the Belair Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Lower Burrell, PA. The lawsuit claims that her nurse, Heather Pressdee, had a history of negligence when working with patients and that despite her previous work history where she was disciplined for abusive behaviors toward patients and staff, Belair Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center hired her in a management role. Additionally, the facility is accused of not acting accordingly when other healthcare workers at the facility reported their concerns about Pressdee’s interactions with Bower.
According to the lawsuit, Pressdee spent excessive periods of time with Bower which in turn made the other nurses suspicious. When the nurses reported their concerns to facility management, officials failed to act. Bower would later die from an overdose of insulin administered by Pressdee.
Initially, Bower was suspected to have died of respiratory arrest. However, an investigation into her death along with a confession from Pressdee showed that her death was caused by an unnecessary injection of insulin. Bower was not a diabetic and did not need the dose of insulin.
After leaving her employment with Belair in February 2022, Pressdee would go on to work at Quality Life Services in Chicora where she would later allegedly kill two unsuspecting patients and injure one other. According to law enforcement, in December 2022, a 55-year-old man and an 83-year-old man both died after Pressdee injected them with lethal doses of insulin at the Quality Life Services facility. A third victim, a 73-year-old man, was also injected with insulin but survived after an “emergency hospitalization.”
Earlier this year, Presdee was charged with two counts of homicide and one count of attempted murder in connection to the two deaths at Quality Life Services. According to Attorney General Michelle Henry, two of the three victims were not diabetic.
The attorney representing Bower’s family, Robert N. Peirce III, shares that the facility that hired Pressdee should be held liable because they did not consider her previous employment history and did not act accordingly when concerns were raised. "She was either terminated or voluntarily resigned from these six prior facilities due to abuse towards staff or residents and yet she was hired in April of 2021 to be put in a management position," the family’s legal team shared.
Under Pennsylvania background check laws, an employer can consider an individual's misdemeanor and/or felony convictions as they relate to the suitability of employment in the new position. Employers can also run background checks, but these checks will not include information on why an employee was fired. New employers can always ask why a prospective hire was fired, but a lot of employers may be wary of going into detail because of legal liability.
While Pressdee did not have any reported misdemeanor or felony convictions, in August 2021, the governing body of nursing homes in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH), did cite the Belair facility for “failing to assess and document signs of changes in multiple residents' blood sugar levels,” according to the family’s law firm.
Because of this, a citation was issued to the facility that residents were in "immediate jeopardy" of a "situation which has caused, or is likely to cause, serious injury, harm, impairment, or death as a result of the nursing home's noncompliance with one or more regulations."
The DOH investigation noted that Heather Pressdee admitted she did not alert a physician when a resident’s blood sugar was well beyond normal levels.
After her arrest, authorities confirmed that they “identified a pattern of Pressdee being disciplined for abusive behavior towards patients and/or staff at each facility resulting in her resigning or being terminated.”
After filing the lawsuit, Peirce maintained, “To allow her behavior with patients to go unchecked despite multiple concerns from staff, is unconscionable. No one who trusts a facility with their loved one’s care should ever have to experience what Marianne Bower’s family is going through.”
