Reta Mays: An Angel of Death Stalking Her Own At VA Hospital

Em Carpenter

Em was one of those argumentative children who was sarcastically encouraged to become a lawyer, so she did. She is a proud life-long West Virginian, and, paradoxically, a liberal. In addition to writing about society, politics and culture, she enjoys cooking, podcasts, reading, and pretending to be a runner. She will correct your grammar. You can find her on Twitter.

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2 Responses

  1. Thanks for writing this up. The first news blurbs I read about it (and I did NOT read them very carefully or at all fully) suggested, to me, that she was simply a harried health worker who was pressured by the system to administer medicine, and when bad things happened she got blamed for it. I realize, after reading your piece, that that wasn’t the case at all.

    I do think I see this differently:

    But in the end, the reason people like Mays kill is the same reason that people like BTK and the Night Stalker do: because they want to.

    To me, that just repeats the original question, which can be rephrased as “why do they want to?”

    A really informative post. Thanks for writing it.

    ETA: fixed a tagReport

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    A mitigating factor here (for damage done, not culpability) is that, AFAICT, the victims were all 80+ years old (one was 96) and in poor health, and thus unlikely to have lived much longer anyway. The total loss of quality-adjusted life years is probably comparable to or less than it would be in the murder of one young adult.

    I don’t have a Twitter account, but I saw your tweet about putting together a cabinet in the feed on this site. If your muscles are just sore, that’s delayed onset muscle soreness, which happens whenever you use a muscle more than you’re used to. It has nothing to do with aging, and can occur even in children. The best way to prevent it in the future, and to mitigate age-related frailty in general, is to keep exercising on a regular basis.Report