A nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital has taken the stand in the trial of Lucy Letby, who is accused of murdering 7 babies and attempting to murder 10 more.
The nurse, who was unidentified for legal reasons, detailed an incident where twin siblings had died within 24 hours.
Nurse A had been trying to resuscitate Baby A along with other staff when she felt his final heartbeat.
The following night, at about 12.30am on June 10, 2015, Lucy Letby, the long-time friend she had once mentored as a student, called her over to the incubator of Baby B.
‘Lucy went over to her,’ she told the jury on the 11th day of Letby’s trial at Manchester Crown Court.
‘She’d been standing with me, checking the medication. Lucy said ‘She’s apnoeic, she’s not breathing’. She asked me to go and help’.
The two nurses had to use a neopuff device to give the infant breaths because she was not breathing herself. ‘She was very pale. She had blotches to her skin’, said Nurse A.
She went on: ‘She suddenly looked very ill. She looked very like her brother had done the night before. She was pale, white, with this purple, blotchy discolouration.
‘I just remember thinking ‘Oh no, not again’. I’d not seen anything like that before. To see his sister with the same appearance…’
A medical note of the incident read: ‘Shut down, limp, apnoeic…Colour changed rapidly to purple blotchiness with white patches. Started to become bradycardic (slow heart rate).
Letby, 32, from Hereford, denies murdering seven babies and attempting to kill a further ten.
Nurse A told Ben Myers, KC, defending, said she had first become a friend of Letby when the alleged killer was studying at Chester University around 2010 and 2011.
She had come to the neonatal unit twice during her training, and eventually joined the team permanently once she had qualified.
Nurse A said she had mentored Letby on both occasions she came to the hospital as a student.
She agreed with Mr Myers that she found her colleague and friend ‘highly qualified and dedicated to the work she was doing’ as a neonatal nurse.
