Anthony Greene was a 57-year-old Black man admitted to Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Islip, New York, with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. After a respiratory arrest on September 28, 1987, he was resuscitated but remained in a coma and died on October 16, 1987.

Investigators later linked a series of unexpected respiratory failures and code emergencies on the same shift to unauthorized injections of neuromuscular blocking agents into patients who had not been prescribed them. A surviving patient, Gerolamo Kuchich, reported seeing a bearded man place something into his IV; testing showed paralytic drugs not ordered for him, which led police to nurse Richard Angelo. Angelo confessed to injecting paralytic agents into other patients, and prosecutors built murder charges around the claim that those injections caused fatal respiratory failure.

At trial, Angelo admitted injecting patients; his defense presented experts who described a disorder affecting his recognition of risk, while the prosecution’s experts argued he understood the danger. On December 14, 1989, a jury found Angelo guilty of second-degree murder for Greene and another patient, along with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and multiple assault convictions; sentencing followed in January 1990. Does anyone have memories of Good Samaritan Hospital’s ICU during that period or information that could shed more light on these events?