An Almost Perfect Murder by Gary C. King

Author:Gary C. King [King, Gary C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2014-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

Tina Carbone, Jenkins learned, like Kathryn Almaraz, had viewed Chaz Higgs as the victim in an abusive relationship with his wife. Tina had been a registered nurse for fourteen years and had been employed at Washoe Medical Center for the past thirteen years. As a nurse manager with fifty-four nurses under her supervision, she was the person who had hired Chaz at South Meadows for the emergency department, just prior to that facility’s opening in February 2004. Although Chaz and Tina had occasionally talked about his personal life, he had not talked about his wife much during his first year of employment, Tina said. It wasn’t until he had been placed on probation by the hospital’s human resources department, at the time that Linda Ramirez had been fired over the e-mail exchanges between her and Chaz, that Chaz and Tina began having conversations about his wife.

Chaz was unhappy at that time because Kathy, he had said, was being very controlling and was very possessive. It had gotten to the point where Chaz began talking about moving out of their house, and had begun looking for a place to stay because their relationship was progressively getting worse. Although he had not frequently used derogatory language about Kathy in Tina’s presence, she recalled one occasion in which he had referred to her as a “bitch.” She said that because he was often at the triage desk and because her office was behind it, they’d had most of their conversations inside her office because her door was always open. His visits to her office became more and more frequent, to the point where his conversations with Tina had become “problematic,” where Tina began to feel that her job was in jeopardy—not because of Chaz Higgs but because of his wife and the power that she wielded.

Tina confirmed that although she had never used succinylcholine and etomidate together on a patient, the two drugs were kept stored inside a rapid-sequence intubation kit, basically a tray of medications and associated supplies, within the emergency department for easy access when it was needed. The kit had an orange tab or seal that had to be broken to get inside it. Succinylcholine, she said, was also stored in what was known as the “Med Select,” a storage refrigerator that the nursing staff could open by entering their password. She claimed that it would not be difficult to take a vial of succinylcholine out of the facility undetected.

At one point, Tina told investigators, Chaz’s wife, Kathy, had begun harassing her. Tina, a married woman, had offered to rent Chaz an extra room at her and her husband’s house if he decided to leave Kathy. As best as she could recall, the harassment had started around the time that she and her husband had made the offer to Chaz, or at about the time e-mails were being passed back and forth between Chaz and Linda Ramirez. Even though Chaz hadn’t moved out of the house he shared with Kathy, and had not taken Tina and her husband up on their offer, the harassment continued.

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