John Stanley Fisher, a 75-year-old white man from Amityville, died at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip on Long Island on September 8, 1987. According to reporting and court records, he abruptly went into a medical emergency in the early hours and could not be revived despite staff efforts. Fisher’s death became part of a pattern investigators identified in the hospital’s cardiac and intensive-care wards, where an unusually high number of code blue events occurred on one nurse’s shifts.

Investigators alleged that patients were being injected with paralytic drugs that could stop breathing and mimic sudden collapse. That suspicion focused on nurse Richard Angelo after a patient who survived reported being injected without medical justification; Angelo was arrested in November 1987. Prosecutors tied Fisher’s death to that course of conduct, arguing he had been injected and noting Angelo was present during the failed resuscitation.