Sandra L. Lincoln, an 82-year-old White/Caucasian woman from Chicora, Pennsylvania, died on April 17, 2023, at Sunnyview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Butler, Pennsylvania. At first, her obituary described her death as coming after a short illness, the kind of brief public notice families often release while they are still grieving and before the full story is known.
Later, her name became part of a much larger criminal investigation into former nurse Heather Pressdee, whose work in several western Pennsylvania care facilities was tied to a series of suspicious patient deaths and insulin poisonings.
Lincoln was a resident at Sunnyview when Pressdee was working there. In the civil lawsuit later filed on behalf of Lincoln’s estate, the family alleged that Sunnyview failed to protect her from a dangerous employee and failed to respond properly to warnings and unusual deaths at the facility. The lawsuit claimed staff failed to prevent Pressdee from giving Lincoln unnecessary insulin, failed to notify state health officials about suspicious deaths, and failed to act on reports of suspected abuse. One of the most disturbing allegations was that a certified nursing assistant heard Pressdee say Lincoln “needed to die” less than an hour before Lincoln was pronounced dead.
The lawsuit described Lincoln’s final moments as part of an alleged deliberate act, not a natural decline. Pressdee allegedly called Lincoln’s daughter and said her mother was “actively dying” shortly after the alleged comment was made. Investigators later said Pressdee admitted she administered insulin to Lincoln, and when that did not bring about the intended result, she injected air into Lincoln’s PICC line in an effort to cause an air embolism. The allegation placed Lincoln among the patients authorities said were harmed by excessive insulin or other lethal conduct while under Pressdee’s care.
Pressdee, of Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, became the central suspect. She was first arrested in May 2023 and later faced additional charges as investigators linked her conduct to more patients across multiple nursing homes. By November 2023, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office announced dozens of new charges, saying Pressdee had allegedly administered lethal doses of insulin to patients beginning in 2020. Authorities said she was connected to the mistreatment of 22 patients in total, 17 of whom died, at facilities in Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler, and Westmoreland counties. Lincoln was specifically named in reporting as one of the patients whose death led to criminal charges against Pressdee.
The case widened because investigators and families alleged the warning signs had followed Pressdee from facility to facility. Civil filings and news reports described a history of complaints, firings, resignations, and accusations of abusive behavior toward patients and staff before she arrived at Sunnyview. Lincoln’s estate argued that Sunnyview and related management defendants should have known Pressdee posed a risk and should never have placed her in a position of authority over vulnerable residents. The family sought damages and demanded a jury trial.
Pressdee ultimately did not go to trial. On May 2, 2024, she pleaded guilty in Butler County Court to three counts of first-degree murder and 19 counts of criminal attempt to commit murder. The plea covered her administration of lethal and potentially lethal doses of insulin to 22 patients across several facilities. As part of the plea agreement, she avoided a possible death sentence but received three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus an additional consecutive sentence of 380 to 760 years for the attempted murder counts.
The punishment ensured Pressdee would spend the rest of her life in prison. In court, relatives of victims described the pain of learning that deaths they had once understood as illness or age-related decline had instead been treated by prosecutors as criminal acts. For Sandra Lincoln’s family, the story that began with an obituary for a woman who died in a Butler nursing home became part of one of Pennsylvania’s most disturbing health-care murder cases, centered on a nurse accused and later convicted of using her access to vulnerable patients as a weapon.
