A Texas nurse was convicted Tuesday of the murder of four patients who died after being injected with air while recovering from heart operations.
The Smith County jury deliberated for about an hour before finding William George Davis of Hallsville guilty of capital murder.
Prosecutors plan to ask for the death penalty during the sentencing phase
, which begins Wednesday.
Davis, 37, was accused of injecting air into the arteries of all four patients after they underwent heart surgery at Tyler's Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in 2017 and 2018.
During recovery from their surgeries, all four - John Lafferty, Ronald Clark, Christopher Greenway, and Joseph Kalina - suffered unexplained neurological problems and died
.
Prosecutor Chris Gatewood said Davis "liked to kill people."
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During the trial, William Yarbrough, a Dallas-area pulmonologist and professor of internal medicine, explained to the jury how the injection of air into the arterial system of the brain causes injury and death.
Yarbrough said he was able to determine that there was air in the arterial system of the victims' brains by looking at the images from the brain scans;
something he said he had never observed in his decades of medical work.
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He ruled out blood pressure problems or any other cause of death other than an air injection, and said this must have happened after the surgeries, because the complications happened while the patients were in recovery.
Defense attorney Phillip Hayes told the jury that the hospital was in trouble and that Davis was a scapegoat who was only charged because he was there when the deaths occurred.
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Prosecutor Chris Gatewood said during closing arguments that Davis "
liked to kill people
.
"
And the prosecutor Jacob Putman denounced that the hospital had not changed any procedure after the patient's departure but had not registered any other similar deaths.