An 82-year-old male patient, **Jose Alfaro**—whose publicly available records do not specify his ethnicity—was one of the elderly in-patients at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, California, whose unexpected death was later traced to a hospital serial-murder scheme. Contemporary compilations list his date of death as **August 15 1997** in the roster of confirmed victims, though other investigative reports place the fatal episode on **January 4 1997** after a brief admission that began two days earlier; in every source, however, his age is consistently recorded as 82 and his gender as male.
The 82-year-old man had been hospitalized with severe pneumonia, emphysema, and chronic pulmonary and arterial disease. His chart originally recorded “cardiorespiratory failure” as the cause of death, a finding that appeared plausible given his underlying conditions. His family—who remembered him as a World War II veteran—accepted the ruling until rumors of an “Angel of Death” circulating inside the respiratory-therapy unit prompted a re-examination of dozens of seemingly natural demises at the facility.
Suspicion focused on **Efren Saldivar**, a night-shift respiratory therapist who later admitted killing scores of patients by injecting the paralytic drug Pavulon. An internal probe uncovered vials of that drug and used syringes in his locker, triggering a criminal investigation. Investigators exhumed 20 bodies; toxicology tests detected Pavulon in six of them, including the remains of the 82-year-old male victim, whose official cause of death was revised from natural failure to homicide by pharmacological paralysis.
Saldivar was arrested in January 2001 and arraigned on six counts of murder, one of which was for the killing of the 82-year-old male patient. In courtroom filings, prosecutors stressed the pattern of paralyzing-agent overdoses and the betrayal of medical trust. On **March 12 2002**, the 32-year-old therapist pleaded guilty to all six murders plus an attempted murder, thereby avoiding the death penalty; he received **seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole**. The victim’s widow, Cecilia Alfaro, publicly condemned the crime, emphasizing that her husband’s life had been taken without right or mercy.
