Minnie Lee Dempsey was 88 when she was admitted to the Community Hospital of the Valleys ICU in Perris with chest pain, shortness of breath and congestive heart failure during the night of April 5, 1981. She was conscious on arrival but about half an hour later suffered violent seizures, then respiratory and cardiac arrest; staff revived her, but seizures continued until she was placed on a respirator. She had another arrest at 6:32 a.m., and died at 7:18 a.m. on April 6, 1981.

Dempsey’s case became central to an investigation into a series of similar, unusually violent seizures and deaths on the night shift that began after a new nurse, Robert Rubane Diaz, started on March 29. Toxicologists and a pathologist testified that quantities of lidocaine recovered from her tissues, and an abnormal cardiac rhythm strip, were consistent with one or more massive overdoses of lidocaine; the pathologist listed lidocaine poisoning as the cause of death alongside hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease. The defense proposed alternative medical explanations and disputed that the drug levels proved a lethal dose had been given deliberately.

Does anyone have additional details about Dempsey’s medical care that night or eyewitness accounts from staff who worked that ICU shift?