John Stanley Fisher, a 75-year-old white man, went into Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip on Long Island expecting the slow, ordinary rhythms of recovery—monitors beeping, nurses making rounds, daylight fading into the long hush of night shift. Instead, in the early hours of September 8, 1987, he abruptly crashed into a medical emergency and could not be brought back, dying at the hospital while staff fought to revive him.
In the months that followed, Fisher’s death was pulled into a frightening pattern that investigators said was unfolding inside the cardiac and intensive-care wards: too many “code blue” crises seemed to erupt on one nurse’s shifts, and the rescues that followed began to look less like coincidence and more like a script. Reporters at the time described how the very person who often appeared first at the bedside could also have been the one who set the disaster in motion—injecting vulnerable, often elderly patients with paralytic drugs that could stop breathing and mimic sudden collapse.
That suspicion sharpened into a name: Richard Angelo, a Good Samaritan nurse. The investigation publicly broke open after a patient survived long enough to report being injected without medical justification, and Angelo was arrested in mid-November 1987 after police focused on him in connection with that assault. Investigators then widened the net—exhumations followed, searching for traces of the same kinds of drugs that could silently paralyze a body from the inside.
Fisher became one of the deaths prosecutors tied to that story. Evidence presented in the later case argued that he had been injected, and jurors heard testimony about the frantic, futile effort to revive him—an emergency in which Angelo was present as resuscitation failed. In court records and reporting about the case, Fisher was identified as being from Amityville, and his death date—September 8, 1987—was treated as an early marker in the string of collapses investigators said were engineered rather than natural.
The case ultimately produced arrests, charges, and convictions centered on Angelo. In December 1989, a jury found him guilty across multiple counts tied to several patients, including a conviction for second-degree manslaughter in Fisher’s death, along with assault-related convictions connected to the harm done during the same course of conduct. The court then imposed a maximum sentence described in contemporary reporting as 50 years to life, framing the crimes as a betrayal of patients who should have been safest when they were most helpless.
