Paul Nittoly

Paul Nittoly is the attorney retained by Somerset Medical Center to handle its internal investigation into a series of unexplained patient emergencies, including deaths that might be connected to drug poisoning. His former experience as an assistant prosecutor made him seem like a potential bridge between the hospital’s inquiry and the police investigation. Yet when detectives sought the results of five months of internal work, Nittoly said there were no final reports or definite conclusions to hand over. His role thus comes to embody a central difficulty in the case: information gathered inside a hospital did not readily become evidence that investigators could use.

Identity and Professional Background

Nittoly first appears at a meeting with detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin as counsel for Somerset Medical Center. He introduces himself on the hospital’s behalf and explains its position carefully: the institution is notifying the Prosecutor’s Office, but is not reporting a homicide, exactly. The distinction frames the matter as a set of unresolved medical incidents rather than a confirmed criminal case.

The hospital had experienced five unexplained patient incidents in its Critical Care Unit over five months, followed by a sixth. The patients had abnormal laboratory findings and life-threatening symptoms; five had died. Nittoly’s account does not establish that the incidents were connected, and the hospital’s senior vice president, William Cors, avoids asserting a cause-and-effect relationship. The language of uncertainty was not incidental: at this stage, the institution had not identified who or what was responsible.

Nittoly had previously worked as an assistant prosecutor in Essex County before joining the law firm Drinker Biddle and Reath. Detectives therefore saw his prosecutorial background as potentially useful. Braun hoped that someone familiar with homicide investigations might help them understand what the hospital had already learned and avoid repeating work. That expectation shaped the later disappointment: Nittoly appeared to possess the professional experience to understand the detectives’ needs, but the material they received did not answer them.

The Hospital’s Internal Investigation

Somerset Medical Center’s administration engaged Nittoly’s firm on September 19, nearly a month after an insulin incident involving patient Francis Agoada and nearly a week before the hospital reported that incident to the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. Nittoly and private investigator Rocco E. Fushetto handled the internal inquiry. By the time the detectives met with him, the inquiry had been underway for months, and Braun expected to receive substantial files, interviews, and other records.

The chronology matters. The hospital had already conducted an internal investigation before bringing the police into the matter, but the handoff did not provide detectives with a developed account of what had happened. Nittoly said that he and Fushetto had investigated the incidents without identifying the person responsible. They had not prepared final reports and had reached no definite conclusions. When Braun asked about interviews with nurses, Nittoly said they had not generated a report of that work either.

The detectives left with a small package of four pages rather than the underlying material Braun had anticipated. Nittoly told them they had already been given everything available. The difference between the scale of the hospital’s inquiry and the limited documentation offered to police became especially consequential because the suspected events depended on medical records, drug histories, and staff interviews. The absence of a usable investigative record did not prove that information had been deliberately withheld; it did leave the detectives without the account they had hoped the hospital’s work would supply.

Cullen and the Police Inquiry

The meeting established that Charles Cullen had been among the nurses interviewed on the unit. When Danny asked whether Nittoly had spoken with Cullen, Nittoly confirmed that he was one of the nurses questioned. The exchange made Cullen part of the investigative landscape, but Nittoly’s answer did not supply a substantive account of the interview or explain what, if anything, it had revealed.

The limits were stark against the accumulating medical evidence. Investigators knew patients had suffered unexplained, life-threatening events, while laboratory findings and later inquiries pointed toward poisoning. But at Somerset Medical Center, detectives still lacked key records and physical evidence. The hospital had not supplied Pyxis drug-removal records, and Nittoly could not provide interviews or background sufficient to fill the gap. Investigators were left trying to establish both what had happened to the patients and whether the incidents could be connected to Cullen.

Nittoly’s position sat at the boundary between the hospital’s internal process and the criminal investigation. He was not the police investigator, and the available evidence does not establish that he knew the cause of the incidents or intentionally obstructed the case. What the narrative does show is the practical consequence of an incomplete transfer: months of internal work yielded detectives few documents and no definite findings, while the suspected patient poisonings remained difficult to prove.

Narrative Significance

Nittoly is presented less through private motives than through what his professional role can—and cannot—deliver. His prosecutorial background raises the detectives’ hopes that the hospital’s inquiry will have produced useful leads; his report of no conclusions, no final reports, and no written interview findings narrows those hopes. The contrast is not simply between a lawyer and police officers. It is between an institution’s prolonged internal examination and the evidentiary demands of a criminal investigation.

That gap compounds the larger problem facing Braun and Baldwin. Somerset Medical Center had been investigating abnormal patient incidents for five months, yet the detectives were still short of records that could establish what drugs had been accessed, who had administered them, and how the cases fit together. Nittoly’s brief encounter with them therefore marks a consequential failed handoff: the hospital’s inquiry had not produced the documentary foundation the police needed, and identifying Cullen as one nurse interviewed was only a starting point, not an answer.