Outbreak: Michigan Murder Trial to Resume

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Nearly a dozen witnesses are set to testify about the grim details of a deadly 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak in the second degree murder trial of two former drug company pharmacists.
Preliminary hearings in the trial of Barry J. Cadden and Glenn Chin are set to resume on Feb. 13 in a Michigan courtroom. The two have been charged with 11 counts of second degree murder for their roles in the outbreak which has led to the death of some 100 victims nationwide.
Cadden and Chin already are serving sentences in federal prison following their convictions on racketeering and mail fraud charges, but two federal juries declined to convict them on second degree murder charges.
Cadden was president and part owner of the New England Compounding Center, the company that produced fungus riddled steroids that caused the outbreak. Chin was a supervisor in the NECC clean room where the deadly doses were prepared.
Virtually all of the witnesses expected to appear in Michigan already have testified in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass. Their prior testimony gives hints of what can be expected in the two weeks of upcoming hearings.
They include Dr. Benjamin Park and Mary Brandt of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both testified about the desperate race to find the cause of the growing number of deaths.
Park told jurors he felt like he was looking over a cliff and could not see the bottom as he tried to determine the ultimate scope of the outbreak.
Brandt said there was little known about the mysterious cause of the deaths.
"We had to know what fungus we had..There was very little expertise," she testified.
She told jurors a major step forward came when they began using a new real-time test to quickly identify what type of fungus they were dealing with.
Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, a Michigan medical examiner, detailed for jurors the way the fungus, once injected into the spines of victims, worked its way up the spinal column to literally destroy brain tissue.
Federal prosecutors attempted to have Jentzen show jurors photos of the destroyed brain tissue, but U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled that would be too prejudicial and inflammatory.
Also on the witness list is U.S. Food and Drug Administration Special Agent Benedict Celso who testified about Chin's 2012 arrest as he was about to board a plane for China.
Other witneses testified about the shocking conditions they discovered when they raided NECC's Framingham, Mass. headquarters.
"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," said Almaris Alonzo Claudio of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, of her reaction when told the air conditioning was turned off at night in NECC's drug production area. She said temperatures and humidity soared as a result.
Former NECC employees like Nichols Booth and Owen Finnegan testified about drugs being sent out without sterility or other testing and the routine use of expired ingredients.
Former employee Joseph Connelly described how he saw Chin and Cadden conferring just before untested drugs were shipped out.
Tiffany Hyde, a microbiologist for an Oklahoma testing company described her reaction when fungus bloomed in a petri dish when she was testing an NECC drug sample. She was so surprised she said she stopped to take a picture.
Cadden and Chin have been charged in the deaths of 11 Michigan patients: Jennie Barth, Patricia Malafouris, Ruth Madouse, Donna Kruzich, Paula Brent, Lyn Laperriere, Sally Roe, Mary Plettl, Gayle Gibson, Emma Todd and Karine Baxter. Nine of those victims' deaths were included in the federal case, but the deaths of Barth, Malafourios and Madouse were not. That raises the possibility that a double jeopardy claim could be filed on the nine repeat cases. Cadden and Chin's attorneys did not respond to questions about that possibility.
The hearings scheduled for Feb. 13, 14, 19, 20, and 21 are being held to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to take the two defendants to trial.
The Michigan charges were filed by former Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette just before he left office. Current Attorney General Dana Nessel has taken over the prosecution.
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