Fifth lawsuit filed in deaths at West Virginia VA hospital

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The number of lawsuits has grown to five involving the sudden deaths of seven patients at a West Virginia veterans hospital where a former nursing assistant admitted to intentionally giving them wrongful insulin injections.

A federal lawsuit was filed Monday in the March 2018 death of Archie D. Edgell at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg. The suit said administrators and staff made no effort to investigate the unexplained deaths and “failed to properly protect Archie Edgell and others veterans from a serial killer” hired by the hospital.

Morgantown attorney Dino Colombo filed the lawsuit on behalf of Edgell's son, Steven Edgell. His father was an 84-year-old Army veteran from Center point.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, is the latest to allege a widespread system of failures at the hospital.

Fired hospital nursing assistant Reta Mays pleaded guilty earlier this month to intentionally killing seven patients with fatal doses of insulin. Mays, 46, faces up to life in prison for each of seven counts of second-degree murder. No sentencing date has been set.

Mays admitted at a plea hearing to purposely killing the veterans, injecting them with unprescribed insulin while she worked overnight shifts at the hospital in northern West Virginia between 2017 and 2018. Her motive is still unclear. U.S. Attorney Bill Powell said authorities did not receive a “satisfactory response” to questions about the reasoning behind her actions.

The lawsuit said the federal government failed to properly train, mentor and supervise Mays or screen her personal and professional background.

Edgell's listed cause of death as advanced dementia was erroneous, the lawsuit said. His physicians “simply wrote Mr. Edgell off as yet...