The Death Shift
When nurse Genene Jones was on duty in a San Antonio hospital, babies had mysterious emergencies and sometimes died. Then she moved to a Kerrville clinic, and the awful pattern began again.
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When Mrs. Reichenau returned to the treatment room, Genene had prepared the IV and the fluids that were to flow through it into her daughter’s bloodstream. “You might want to step out in the hall because it’s not easy on a mother to watch,” Genene told her. “She’s going to cry, and she’s going to scream.” Mrs. Reichenau said she didn’t need to leave. “I told her I was pretty stout, I could take it,” she says. Dr. Holland had returned to the room and now she helped hold Misty. “They were trying to stick [the IV] in,” says Mrs. Reichenau. “Misty was crying and hollering.” And then the IV line was in her arm—and she wasn’t. “She looked at me with a far-off look in her eyes. I said, ‘There something wrong.’” “She’s just holding her breath,” said Genene. “She’s scared.” Genene ordered Mrs. Reichenau out the door. Misty wasn’t breathing.
Inside the treatment room Misty was having a seizure. Genene says she and Holland wanted to put a breathing tube down the child’s throat, but “we had a hard time getting her teeth unclenched.” Debbie Sultenfuss appeared in the room with a bottle of Anectine—a trade name for the muscle relaxant succinylcholine—that she says Holland had asked for to keep Misty from struggling against the breathing tube. Holland, on the other hand, says she never asked for the drug and that when Debbie brought it in, she didn’t know the proper dosage and didn’t want to use it. Debbie says she placed the bottle on a counter in the treatment room, behind a cotton-ball dispenser. When the office had opened, Holland had stocked it with one bottle of Anectine; now, without Holland’s fully registering it, this bottle had been separated from the other drugs in the office. The bottle would soon become a crucial piece of evidence in the prosecutor’s murder case against Genene Jones.
The ambulance arrived at Sid Peterson at 3:07 p.m., and Genene took Misty up to the ICU. After a while Holland came out and told the Reichenaus—Larry had arrived at the hospital by then—that she wanted to fly Misty to Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio for tests and observation. When Misty arrived there, Dr. Ray W. Mackey, a pediatric neurologist, found her “agitated, breathing on her own, and struggling against” the breathing tube, which he took out. He conducted an assortment of tests that revealed no explanation for the seizures. Misty was sent home after five days at Medical Center Hospital.
A few days after Misty Reichenau’s first office visit, Genene Jones told Dr. Holland that she had completed an inventory of the office’s drugs and discovered that a small vial of Anectine was missing—presumably the same vial that Debbie had left in the treatment room during Misty’s seizure. Holland told her to search the office. If you can’t find it, she told Genene, log it as missing and order another bottle. Since the original bottle, to Holland’s mind, had disappeared, a replacement vial was ordered from the Sid Peterson pharmacy on September 7.
By mid-September the large group living in the three-bedroom house on Nixon Lane—Genene, her children Heather and Michael, Dr. Holland, and Debbie—had settled in. They had been joined by Cathy Ferguson, a nineteen-year-old woman Genene had met a few months earlier in San Antonio; when Genene moved to Kerrville, Cathy, a former mental patient (Genene says she is retarded; the prosecutors say she has “a personality disorder”), followed. After work, Genene began to take walks to the top of a hill behind the house, where she would sit and meditate. She had grown fond of the movie E.T., and she started referring to her visits to the hilltop as going to “talk to E.T.” One day in the office, Gwen began to scribble incomprehensibly on a piece of paper. Startled, she told Holland, “Something just made me write this.” They needed to figure out the meaning of what she had written, Gwen said. That Sunday night, Holland, Genene, and Gwen met at the Nixon Lane house, sent Genene’s children off with Cathy Ferguson, lit candles on a counter, turned out the lights, and gathered around a Ouija board. Gwen asked the board what the message meant, and Genene asked whether it had anything to do with the kids in the office. Several days later, says Holland, Debbie joined them for a second session, this time with tarot cards.
Genene and Holland both say the mystical meetings were nothing more than fun and games, a matter of indulging others who took it seriously, and that no individual patients were discussed. “It was all [Gwen’s] idea, and now they’re trying to accuse us of witchcraft,” says Genene. “We pacified her because she was damn hysterical. Shit, I don’t talk to spirits. The only spirit I talk to is the Lord himself.”
Chelsea McClellan: The End
Friday, September 17
Petti McClellan says her daughter wasn’t sick on the day she died. She says she called Dr. Holland’s office on Thursday to make an appointment not for Chelsea but for her son Cameron, who had the flu. But when she called, Petti says, “Kathy Holland said she wanted me to bring Chelsea in. I said, ‘Chelsea’s fine.’ She said she wanted to check on her. She just insisted I bring her in.”
Genene Jones and Kathy Holland both tell it differently. Says Genene: Petti “had called in and told Gwen [that Chelsea] was having increased blue spells. She also stated she’d had two seizures that lasted three minutes each that day. She felt the blue spells were getting worse.” Says Holland: “The call was not to set up an appointment to see Cameron. She told me that Chelsea had a cold that day, that she was having some funny little spells again—frequently. I didn’t ask her just out of the blue to bring Chelsea in.”
Chelsea and Cameron arrived with their mother at Dr. Holland’s office about 10:30 a.m. Genene picked Chelsea up and weighed her, and Holland said she wanted to give Chelsea her inoculations. Petti remembers the doctor’s ordering one shot, but Holland says she asked for two: a diphtheria-tetanus injection and a measles-mumps-rubella shot. Petti volunteered to hold Chelsea, and she took her into the treatment room while Holland went back to the office.
Genene had already prepared the syringes. Chelsea was sitting on Petti’s lap, facing her mother. Genene took the first needle and pushed it into the top of Chelsea’s left thigh. Within seconds Chelsea began to have trouble breathing. “I tried to tell her there was something wrong,” says Petti. “She was just insistent about giving her another shot. I said, ‘Stop, do something. She’s having another seizure.’ She said, ‘I have to give her this other shot.’ I said, ‘Stop, do something now!’ ”
Genene says she told Petti that she thought Chelsea was “just reacting to pain.” The child looked better after a few moments, says Genene, so she gave her the second injection, this one in the top of Chelsea’s right thigh. By the time Genene pulled the second syringe out, Chelsea wasn’t breathing at all. She turned blue and began having a seizure. “I had never in my life seen anything so horrible,” says Petti. Chelsea was “trying to breathe and couldn’t, jerking all over. It was horrible.”
The ambulance arrived at the office at 10:58 a.m., and Chelsea was in the Sid Peterson emergency room ten minutes later. Soon her color returned and she began breathing on her own. “She was very bright pink,” Holland says. “She was looking very good.” But Holland nonetheless thought it best to get her to Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio immediately. “I felt sure something neurological was going on that we were missing,” she says.
The ambulance left Sid Peterson at 12:36 p.m. Chelsea, Genene, and an EMT were in the back. Dr. Holland followed the ambulance in her white Datsun, while Petti and Reid McClellan followed her in their own car. Chelsea was on a heart monitor and was receiving IV fluids. She was breathing through a tube attached to a respiratory bag. Genene and the EMT took turns pumping oxygen into her lungs. They were cruising along at code two, says the ambulance’s driver—a step away from a full emergency. Everything seemed stable. Eight miles down the road, the peaks and valleys on the heart monitor fell into a flat line; Chelsea was arresting. The EMT worked the respiratory bag faster. Genene ordered the driver to stop the ambulance, and they pulled over onto the side of the road.
Holland jumped into the ambulance. “She’s flat-lined!” shouted Genene, who was performing chest compressions. Holland checked Chelsea’s heart with a stethoscope and heard nothing. She jumped onto the stretcher, straddled Chelsea, and took over the heart massage while ordering Genene to draw up a round of resuscitative drugs: epinephrine, calcium gluconate, sodium bicarbonate. No response. She ordered another round. “Get me to a hospital—quick!” Holland ordered. The ambulance pulled onto the highway and took the second exit. They arrived at the Comfort Community Hospital—a tiny one-story building where the doctors’ parking area is marked by a rusty sign nailed to a tree—at 1:05 p.m. and rushed Chelsea into the small emergency room. They had radioed ahead, and the hospital staff was waiting. Dr. Holland ordered up several more rounds of drugs and took turns with Genene and the driver at compression while the EMT worked the respiratory bag. Chelsea’s heart flickered on briefly, then stopped, then beat weakly again. Then stopped. After twenty minutes they gave up. Chelsea McClellan was dead.
Genene removed the IV tube and cleaned Chelsea up. Dr. Holland left the emergency room to tell the McClellans, who were waiting outside. Genene, sobbing, wrapped the body in a blanket and held it. Then she took it out to Petti, who rocked the body and stroked it. “She’s been through this before,” Petti told everyone. “She’s just asleep.”
The procession of cars, driving slowly this time, headed back to Sid Peterson. When Dr. Holland, five days later, filled out the death certificate on Chelsea McClellan, she listed the cause of her fatal cardiac arrest as a seizure and said the seizure had been caused by a disorder of “undetermined etiology.” An autopsy performed at Holland’s request by a San Antonio pathologist blamed Chelsea’s death on sudden infant death syndrome, probably caused by scarring of the brain stem and degeneration of neurons.
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