Anthony Greene, a 57-year-old Black man, entered Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Islip, New York, already burdened by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the kind of illness that makes every breath feel like work. In the cardiac and intensive-care world of the hospital, where alarms and quick decisions are part of the ordinary, Greene’s condition took a sudden turn.
After a respiratory arrest on September 28, 1987, he was resuscitated, but the return of a heartbeat didn’t mean a return to life as he knew it—he remained in a coma, suspended in that long, quiet stretch between crisis and recovery, until he died on October 16, 1987.
As Greene’s family faced the slow-motion tragedy of waiting, something darker was unfolding behind the scenes. A pattern of unexpected respiratory failure and “code” emergencies began to cling to the same place and the same shift, and investigators would later describe the cause in blunt clinical terms: unauthorized injections of a neuromuscular blocking agent—drugs designed to paralyze the muscles of breathing—administered to patients who had never been prescribed them, leaving their bodies to fail from the inside out. In the case that would reach New York’s highest court years later, judges summarized what the jury had heard: a nurse injecting patients with an agent that brought on respiratory distress and, for some, fatal respiratory failure.
The break came when one patient survived long enough to say what he’d seen. Gerolamo Kuchich reported that a bearded man had put something into his IV line; a urine test later showed paralyzing drugs that had not been ordered for him, and the description pointed investigators toward nurse Richard Angelo. Police arrested Angelo for assault connected to that incident, and, after the arrest, he confessed that he had poisoned other patients with paralytic agents, setting off a grim reexamination of recent deaths and a widening circle of suspicion around the hospital’s intensive-care unit.
Greene’s death became one of the central pillars of the criminal case. Prosecutors pursued murder charges built on the idea that injecting a paralyzing drug into an unsuspecting patient—knowing it could stop breathing—showed a depraved indifference to human life. In court, Angelo did not dispute that he had injected patients, but his defense tried to reframe the story as a mind at war with itself, offering expert testimony that he suffered from a disorder that kept him from recognizing the lethal risk of what he was doing. The prosecution countered with its own experts, arguing he understood the danger and chose the act anyway.
On December 14, 1989, the verdicts came down, and Greene’s name was spoken in the most permanent way a courtroom can speak it: Angelo was found guilty of second-degree murder for Greene and another patient, along with additional convictions for manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and multiple assault counts tied to other victims and survivors. In January 1990, a Suffolk County judge imposed a sentence that, stacked together, ran to more than six decades to life, while noting that New York law capped the maximum at 50 years to life. Years later, Angelo’s appeals—focused in part on whether expert testimony could reference polygraph-related material—failed, leaving the convictions intact and Greene’s death fixed in the record as one of the killings the jury concluded was no accident of illness, but the end point of an intentional, unauthorized act carried out in a place where people are supposed to be safest.
