Saint Michael's Hospital

Saint Michael's Hospital is the setting for a crucial independent review of suspicious patient incidents at Somerset Medical Center. By bringing the charts to an outside medical authority, investigators obtain a clinical interpretation that challenges Somerset’s account and gives their inquiry a more concrete direction.

Setting and Investigative Purpose

On October 27, Danny Baldwin drove to Newark with Robert Land and Tim Van Hise of the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Danny had arranged the meeting because the detectives needed an outside medical authority to assess laboratory findings from six Somerset patients; he wanted the charts read by someone who was not part of Somerset Medical Center.

The Somerset group was met in the lobby by Paul Nittoly, the medical center’s counsel, and his private detective. Danny exchanged introductions but held back from discussing the case until he had the medical assessment he had come for. The meeting thus placed the hospital in a specific investigative role: not as the institution reporting the incidents, but as a source of independent clinical judgment.

Leon Smith’s Review

Leon Smith, chief of medicine at Saint Michael's Hospital, had reviewed all six patients’ charts. His reading differed substantially from the account Somerset’s representatives had initially given the detectives. Rather than treating the cases as simply unexplained, Smith focused on the four most abnormal and suspicious laboratory findings.

Those four cases had occurred more than thirty days before the detectives were called, which meant that the corresponding Pyxis records were apparently unavailable. Smith could not provide a medical explanation for what had happened to those patients. In his professional opinion, however, all four appeared to have received an overdose from an outside source.

Investigative Consequences

Smith’s assessment did not identify who had administered the drugs, nor did it by itself connect the overdoses to a particular suspect. It did, however, give investigators an external medical opinion that conflicted with Somerset’s earlier characterization of the cases. The distinction mattered: the charts were no longer only a set of puzzling numbers without an interpretation, but evidence that a physician outside Somerset considered consistent with overdoses from an external source.

Nittoly turned to Danny for a reaction, but Danny had already left the group and was running through the rain to his car. The abrupt exit marks the finding’s force in the investigation: it did not close the case, but it sharpened the suspicion that the patient incidents involved deliberate harm rather than an unresolved medical anomaly.

Narrative Significance

Saint Michael's Hospital functions as a point of contrast in the investigation. Somerset’s account had emphasized unexplained findings and an internal inquiry that had not identified their source; Smith’s review supplied a direct, independent judgment about four of the most suspicious cases. The meeting also exposes the limits of that judgment: the assessment strengthened the overdose hypothesis, while missing Pyxis records and the absence of a named perpetrator left investigators still needing evidence to connect the suspected poisonings to a person.