A French anaesthetist described by prosecutors as “Dr Death” has been found guilty of intentionally poisoning 30 patients and killing 12 over almost a decade as a top medic in France.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, once seen by colleagues as a “star anaesthetist”, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after state prosecutors said he was “one of the biggest criminals in the history of the French legal system”.
The state prosecutor Christine de Curraize said Péchier was a “serial killer” who was “highly twisted” and had tampered with his colleagues’ paracetamol bags or anaesthesia pouches to poison patients, triggering heart attacks.
Another state prosecutor, Thérèse Brunisso, said Péchier was not a doctor “but a criminal who used medicine to kill”. The victims of poisoning were aged between four and 89.
The three-month trial had attempted to unpick Péchier’s reasons for poisoning patients during his work in private clinics in Besançon, in the east of France.
Curraize and Brunisso said the reasons were varied. In some cases, they said Péchier intervened to resuscitate patients he had poisoned in order to pose as a hero.
The court also heard he had acted to damage and discredit co-workers with whom he was in competition or in conflict, targeting their patients in order to make them look incompetent.
Curraize said Péchier had a “need for power”. The court heard he poisoned patients to deal with his own feelings of inadequacy and frustrations. Killing had become “a way of life”, Curraize said.
Brunisso said Péchier’s crimes had two aims: “the physical death of the patient”, but also “the slow and insidious psychological attack on his colleagues”.
Péchier, who has 10 days to appeal, denied any wrongdoing throughout the trial, telling the court: “I have never poisoned anyone … I am not a poisoner.” He was described by lawyers for the victims as emotionless and lacking empathy in court.
Péchier, whose father was also an anaesthetist, was described as having had a privileged upbringing and lived in a large house with his cardiologist wife and three children before he divorced. He had worked at two private clinics where patients went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances between 2008 and 2017. Twelve patients could not be resuscitated and died. Over the course of the inquiry, investigators examined more than 70 reports of “serious adverse events”, medical terminology for unexpected complications or deaths among patients.
Péchier’s youngest victim, a four-year-old identified as Tedy, survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil operation in 2016.
Tedy’s father, Hervé Hoerter Tarby, told the court: “What happened to us is a nightmare. We trusted medicine and we feel betrayed.”
He said his son had spent two days in a coma with his mother kneeling by his bed and praying. The family told the court their son was used by Péchier as an object to “settle scores” between doctors, suggesting Péchier had poisoned the child to harm his colleagues’ reputations. “It’s inhuman, it’s vile,” he said.
Tedy, now 14, did not want to give evidence or stand in court near Péchier, but his father read a written statement in which the boy described his “great suffering”. Tedy wrote: “I understand that, when I was only four, someone used me and my life to create problems. I need 10 minutes more than my classmates to write. I’m afraid that traces of the poisoning will stay with me all my life.”
Sandra Simard was 36 in 2017 when she had a routine back operation. Her heart stopped during the operation, after an anaesthesia pouch was tampered with. She was in a coma for several days and told the court she lived with lifelong consequences. “My whole body is in pain. It’s as if I live in the body of an old person,” she said, using a walking stick in court. She said the end of the day was always worse and winter caused great suffering. “But I can’t complain, because at least I’m alive,” she said.
Morgane Richard, a lawyer for several victims, told the court that Péchier used patients as “cannon-fodder, as weapons” to attack and discredit his fellow doctors who were left shocked by their patients’ unexplained adverse events.
“No one among you can imagine being intentionally killed by a doctor,” she told the jury.
#French #court #finds #twisted #anaesthetist #guilty #killing #patients #France