X-Message-Number: 11704 Date: Sat, 08 May 1999 18:40:16 -0400 From: Jan Coetzee <> Subject: One more thing to worry about Rio de Janeiro - Police suspect a Rio nurse killed up to 132 patients in the past four months to collect commissions offered by local funeral homes, the Brazilian media reported on Saturday. <P> Edson Izidoro Guimaraes, who the Rio press has dubbed "the Angel of Death," admits killing "five or six" but denies cashing in on any of those deaths. <P> Guimaraes says he only wanted to ease patients suffering from AIDS and other serious maladies by taking away oxygen masks or giving lethal injections at Salgado Filho Hospital in Rio's Meier district. <P> "I don't regret what I did," the 42-year-old trauma ward nurse told TV Globo on Saturday. "I did it to those in irreversible comas and whose families were suffering." <P> But police are investigating several Rio funeral homes after Guimaraes told reporters that he received between dlrs 60 ( 100 reals) and $606 (1 000 reals) in commission in exchange for information on each death certificate. Such information gives morticians a head start in contacting the victim's family about funeral arrangements. <P> Guimaraes also conceded that he needed to supplement his monthly income of $333 (550 reals) to pay off debts of $3 000 (5,000 reals). <P> "He may have began doing it to earn money and then just lost control," said Josias Quintal, Rio's secretary for public security. <P> Yet the owner of a funeral home cited by Guimaraes vehemently denied any link. "We have no agreement with any hospital," Manoel de Souza, the owner of the Novo Mundo funeral home told the O Estado news agency on Saturday. <P> City health authorities became suspicious after the hospital's trauma ward registered an unusually high number of deaths since Janaury: 225 patients. <P> When a janitor reported Guimaraes giving an injection to a patient who immediately died, four detectives were sent to pose as patients. They soon discovered that 132 patients had died during Guimaraes' 36 prior shifts, or 3.6 deaths per day. They arrested him on Friday. <P> In Brazil, the crime of euthanasia is punishable by six to 20 years in prison. Guimaraes said that he had never heard of the term. - Sapa-AP </font></p> Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11704