Marian E. Stewart was an 80-year-old patient in the intensive care unit at Community Hospital of the Valleys in Perris when she suffered a sudden cardiac arrest in the early morning of April 13, 1981. She had been admitted several days earlier with respiratory failure from obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia and had recently been revived after a period without breathing. Because of an irregular heartbeat she was receiving lidocaine.

During the night shift Robert Rubane Diaz told staff he intended to give Stewart lidocaine after reporting tachycardia. About an hour and a half later Stewart went into ventricular fibrillation and could not be revived; she was pronounced dead at 6:15 a.m. Toxicologists later concluded her tissues contained about 1,000 milligrams of lidocaine, and a prosecution pathologist attributed her death to lidocaine poisoning with contributing pulmonary hypertensive heart disease. The California Supreme Court record places her fatal episode on April 13, 1981, and her death was among the cases that led investigators to link a series of sudden patient deaths to nurse Robert Rubane Diaz.

Did anyone who knew Marian or worked at the Perris ICU in 1981 see signs in her care that deserve re-examination?