A British nurse injected a complete stranger with a deadly muscle-relaxing anaesthetic for no reason other than “seeking to play God”, a court has heard.
Darren Harris (58) plunged a hypodermic needle loaded with rocuronium into the butt of Gary Lewis, a former police officer and record shop owner. Lewis (65) was effectively paralysed by the drug and collapsed outside his shop in North Yorkshire, unable to talk, move or breathe.
The Telegraph reports that he only survived thanks to the quick actions of a friend and paramedics, who performed CPR and gave him emergency oxygen.
Harris, a married father-of-two, had stolen the drug from the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough, where he worked as part of the operating theatre team.
After injecting his victim, he had tried to make his getaway by driving off in his wife’s car but before the drug took effect, Lewis was able to chase after him and move a sign into the road as a barrier to block his car from leaving.
Instead of trying to use his medical expertise to help Lewis, Harris sat in the car “as if he were watching a TV show” and acted as if “nothing had happened,” Leeds Crown Court was told during his trial.
‘Cold-blooded and calculated’ attack
The police arrested Harris shortly after the incident on 2 July last year, but when asked by an arresting officer what he had injected him with, he replied: “Nothing. I haven’t got a needle… I had a 10ml syringe with water and I’ve just squirted the water.”
Bodycam footage shows the officer then asking: “So you’ve not injected him with anything?” Harris replied: “No.”
Lewis, who served in the police for 30 years, said he suffered two cardiac arrests after the “cold-blooded and calculated” attack before being brought back to life by paramedics.
Harris was jailed for 16 years on Friday and was given a life sentence after being found guilty of attempted murder.
Prosecutors remain perplexed by the “entirely indiscriminate attack” and no motive has ever been established for the “inexplicable” actions.
Prosecutor Richard Herrmann said that police had found no links between the two men and the “entirely motiveless” attempted murder “can only be the defendant seeking to play God”.
Theatre team
Harris had worked as a senior member of the hospital’s cardio-thoracic operating theatre team, but South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said his employment was terminated in August last year.
It said a review into the storage of medications, including controlled drugs, in cardiac theatres and general theatres, was carried out in light of the incident.
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