In the five months that Jennifer Anne Hall was a respiratory therapist at Hedrick Medical Center, the rural Missouri hospital experienced 18 “code blue” incidents—an alarming increase in sudden cardiac arrest events for a hospital that historically averaged one of them a year, according to a police investigator.
Nine of those patients died, and nine recovered. Twenty years later, Hall was charged this month with first-degree murder in one of the deaths—that of 75-year-old Fern Franco.
