Ex-Care Worker Gets 20 Years for Killing Elderly Home Resident

Mito, Ibaraki Pref., July 7 (Jiji Press)–A local court on Tuesday sentenced a former worker at an elderly care home in the city of Koga, Ibaraki Prefecture, east of Tokyo, to 20 years in prison for murdering a resident of the facility six years ago. Public prosecutors charged Megumi Akama, 40, with murdering two residents of the elderly home by injecting air into their intravenous drip tubes while she was working at the facility in 2020. In its ruling in the lay judge trial, Mito District Court in the prefecture acknowledged that both residents were murdered. But it found Akama not guilty of killing one of them, with Presiding Judge Takeshi Yamazaki saying, “There is reasonable doubt to believe that the defendant is the culprit.” Specifically, on the death of 84-year-old Kisaku Suzuki in May 2020, the judge said there is “strong suspicion” that the testimony by a former co-worker at the facility who claimed to have witnessed Akama enter the male resident’s room has “changed,” noting that there is a possibility that a staff member other than the defendant may have entered the room around the time when the crime took place. For the death of 76-year-old Setsuji Yoshida in July the same year, meanwhile, the judge recognized that Akama injected air into his IV line with a syringe. While citing “many unclear” things regarding the circumstances and motive for the crime, the judge said, “This was a malicious act in that it took advantage of medical knowledge and was carried out in a way that made it difficult to identify it as murder.” “It was an indiscriminate crime,” the judge said. The 20-year sentence came against the prosecution’s demand for life imprisonment. The defense plans to appeal against the ruling. Akama’s trial began last December, with a total of 53 court hearings held by June 18. It took 210 days from the first hearing to the ruling, the second-longest such period for a lay judge trial, according to the Supreme Court. During the trial, the prosecution claimed that Akama, a licensed nurse, exploited her medical knowledge to ensure that the murder would be judged as natural deaths, adding that she was driven by stress. Meanwhile, the defense argued that the two residents were not murdered, and that it was difficult to determine the precise causes of their deaths because an autopsy was not carried out on Suzuki and an air analysis was not conducted for Yoshida. Masanori Ishida, deputy chief prosecutor at the Mito District Public Prosecutors Office, said, “We will respond appropriately after carefully examining the ruling and consulting a higher prosecution office.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]