Mary Lund

Mary Lund was the risk manager at Somerset Medical Center during the investigation of unexplained patient poisonings in 2003. Her role placed her between hospital administrators, outside investigators, and regulators: she coordinated communication and records while the hospital tried to account for the cases internally. The account presents her not as the sole decision-maker, but as a central contact within an institution whose response drew increasingly urgent scrutiny.

Role at Somerset

Lund’s title made her a key point of contact as the patient incidents accumulated. When Danny Baldwin and Tim Braun met her at Somerset, the hospital assigned her as their liaison. She had exchanged cards with Baldwin, who understood that she would be the friendly face investigators could approach when they needed the hospital’s cooperation. The same title also appeared in a lawyer’s file memorandum concerning the hospital’s meeting with Charles Cullen: Lund was its recipient and had been the lawyer’s point of contact.

The title carried a tension that the investigation gradually exposed. A risk manager was positioned to help the hospital understand and manage danger, but the relevant danger might involve deliberate harm to patients—and the hospital’s own handling of warning signs. The book traces Lund’s work through that institutional uncertainty rather than supplying a private biography or a separate account of her motives.

Internal inquiry and reporting

By early July, the New Jersey Poison Control Center was pressing Somerset to address the incidents. On July 8, the hospital’s conference call with Poison Control director Steven Marcus was its second conversation with him; the first had gone badly. Marcus used the call to insist that a hospital had a legal obligation to report suspected intentional harm. His increasingly forceful calls had prompted the meeting, and Somerset’s senior administrators were now on the receiving end of his warning.

A few hours later, Lund contacted the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services to report four patient incidents: the digoxin cases involving Reverend Florian Gall and Jin Kyung Han, and two insulin incidents. Her report, sent by fax and email, laid out what Somerset had checked. The hospital had investigated possible manufacturer recalls and adverse drug interactions, checked IV equipment and bedside monitors, and repeated laboratory tests to rule out lab error. As alternative explanations narrowed, Somerset tightened controls on digoxin, following earlier controls on insulin, to make both drugs harder to obtain and to increase nurses’ accountability for them.

The report also described the hospital’s continuing search for an innocent explanation. Somerset said it was reviewing its computerized medication and patient-record systems, the Pyxis MedStation and Cerner, but had not found a record of a medication error that accounted for the incidents. The hospital was also evaluating personnel factors and using independent investigators to interview staff. These steps show the inquiry broadening beyond equipment and laboratory testing, even as the institution continued to investigate internally.

Interviews, records, and disputed accounts

Lund’s role as liaison brought her into direct contact with police as well as hospital counsel. When Baldwin asked whether she and lawyer Raymond J. Fleming had interviewed Cullen after Gall’s death, Lund answered that they had interviewed all the nurses who worked on the unit. A later Fleming memorandum, dated July 25 and included in police investigative records, describes a narrower set of actions: it says that Fleming had interviewed Cullen, while plans remained to speak with nurses who had cared for Gall. It records discussions with Lund about preserving blood samples, reviewing billing records for digoxin that was not documented as administered, and obtaining the Han and Maurer charts. The account does not resolve the difference between Lund’s answer and the memorandum’s description; it preserves both as part of the contested record of what the hospital had done and when.

That memorandum also records the investigators’ then-cautious position. Lund and Fleming agreed that the available records and Cullen’s demeanor did not yet present anything overt enough to require contacting the authorities. At the same time, the ICU and CCU patients were being monitored, digoxin orders and administrations were flagged, and several vials of digoxin were unaccounted for. The measures indicate that the possibility of a connection was already being considered, even though the hospital had not referred the matter to police.

When Baldwin later returned seeking documents, the exchange became more confrontational. He found Lund at her desk and, angry about the material he had received, demanded the complete paperwork. He threatened that if she did not produce it, the FBI could search her office and she could face an obstruction-of-justice charge. Lund picked up the phone. The scene marks a change from the earlier liaison relationship: cooperation over records had become a source of direct conflict, and investigators were no longer treating incomplete documentation as a routine inconvenience.

Escalation and aftermath

The New Jersey Department of Health sent investigator Edward Harbet to Somerset on July 11 and 14. He reviewed the records of the patients involved and the hospital’s internal-investigation summary, and interviewed administrators. He could identify no specific finding that explained the abnormal laboratory values and said others in his department would review the charts. The inquiry therefore moved beyond Somerset’s own internal process, although the state’s response also unfolded in stages.

By September, state officials were concerned that Somerset had reported a fourth incident a month after it occurred, despite having been warned to report any further cases. Department officials considered the delay irresponsible and sought advice about referring the matter to the Attorney General’s office. The Department contacted that office on September 26; Somerset contacted the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office seven days later. The sequence places Lund’s reporting work within a larger and delayed chain of institutional escalation, without establishing that she personally determined when each outside agency was contacted.

Lund was among the Somerset figures named in civil suits related to the hospital. The New Jersey suits against hospitals were settled out of court, with files and settlements sealed; the book notes that no hospital administrators faced criminal proceedings. Her significance is therefore bound to the unresolved institutional record: she served as a practical link among hospital leadership, counsel, investigators, and regulators, while the timeline of reporting and internal inquiry itself became part of the scrutiny surrounding the cases.