Friday's Internet Edition, 11:11 PM, May 16, 2008.
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CODE ENFORCEMENT OFFICER Carol Martinez of the Copperas Cove Fire Department is checking businesses in Cove to ensure they have ‘No Smoking” signage on the entrance to their buildings. The City Ordinance requires businesses to conspicuously post a “No Smoking” sign, the international “No Smoking” symbol (depiction of a burning cigarette enclosed in a red circle with a red bar across it), or other sign containing words or pictures that reasonably prohibit smoking at the entrance to a workplace. On Wednesday alone, Martinez issued four warnings to businesses not compliant with the ordinance. – Photo by TERRY BEEKMAN
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Staff writer - (Editor’s note: This is the first of two part series examing the parole review of Genene Jones. Coryell County congressman John Carter was the presiding judge in the case.)
One of the state prison system’s more infamous female inmates is set for parole review in June and already lawmen are lining up to protest - including our Congressman.
Genene Jones, 54, who currently resides at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice - Institutional Division here, was sent to prison first in 1984 after she was convicted of killing a toddler in Kerrville. Jones, though just a Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN), was a pediatric nurse - and by all accounts a very skilled one - especially adept in high crisis situations like respiratory or cardiac arrest.
But she also was a baby killer.
To make matters worse, she was working for a trusted and high profile pediatrician with a new and flourishing practice.
Jones was convicted of murdering one child and injuring another. But investigators believe she could be responsible for as many as 41 child deaths.
She has, however, served an adequate amount of her sentences, including good time accrued, and in June is eligible for parole.
It’s not her first time. Each time before her nemesis, Ron Sutton, of Junction, has protested her release.
“They can’t do that,” Sutton told the Leader-Press by telephone last week from his home.
Sutton was the district attorney in Kimble and Kerr counties when Jones committed her crime in Kerrville.
He prosecuted her.
“It was the hardest thing I ever did,” Sutton said. “And the hardest part of it was looking at the body of that poor little girl after the exhumation. That really fired me up to get this done.”
Jones was convicted for the death of 8-month-old Chelsea Ann McClellan. Chelsea’s mom Petti took the child to a regular check-up visit at Dr. Kathleen Holland’s Kerrville Clinic where she met Jones, the new nurse, for the first time.
When the nurse took the child to the back of the office for routine injections, the child fell deathly ill and had to be taken to the local Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital where emergency procedures failed to revive her.
She was transported to another medical facility where care givers specialize in children’s health issues but on the way - she died.
It was Friday, September 17, 1982. Reid and Petti McClellan were devastated. Dr. Holland was mortified. She had never lost a patient and when young Chelsea came into her office on that day, the child was not ill.
What could possible have had such a devastating effect on a healthy child in such a short period of time?
And in another short period - the same day Chelsea died, in fact - after Jones returned to Dr. Holland’s clinic to see another child, the boy went into seizures and respiratory arrest and had to be resuscitated.
After Jones got the child stabilized, his parents commented that Jones had appeared to be quite excited over the incident.
Tests afterward indicated there was no reason for such an unexpected episode.
Soon doctors at Sid Peterson noticed an extremely high number of children and infants who - for no apparent reason — became critically ill. They all seemed to come from Dr. Holland’s office.
At about that time, a doctor at Sid Peterson discovered the high number of baby deaths at the hospital where Jones had previously worked, Bexar County Medical Center in San Antonio.
Faced with these facts, the committee began to realize that something out of the ordinary was happening to those children.
Investigators asked Dr. Holland if she used a powerful drug called succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant. She said she had some in her office but did not use it.
It was then, without informing Dr. Holland, that one of the other physicians notified the Texas Rangers.
That’s when Sutton first got involved.
Sutton acquired a court order to have the McClellan infant exhumed. A series of events had brought him to believe that someone had injected the child with succinylcholine and that had been the reason for the death.
The drug causes paralysis of the diaphragm and, thus, suffocation. The problem was, succinylcholine was virtually impossible to detect. But a team of researchers in the Netherlands had devised a trace test and Sutton had found out about it.
Sutton was convinced, he said, that Jones was harming infants because she was addicted to the rush she felt when a team of doctors and nurses - including her - was able to bring a child back to life from the clutches of death. In fact, Sutton told jurors in Georgetown that Jones had used the McClellan infant’s death to try to convince hospital administrators that if Sid Peterson had an infant or pediatric ICU unit, that child would not have died.
“What sticks with me the most is how she calmly did what she did to those children - babies and their families all in order to try to get a pediatric intensive care unit at the Kerrville (Sid Richardson Memorial) Hospital,” Sutton said last week.
The Jones case received enormous amounts of media coverage due to the harshness of the accusations against her and for that reason the Kerr County court decided to move the high profile trial to another county to ensure fairness in jury selection.
(Editor’s. Note: Leader-Press correspondent Paul J. Gately was State Editor at the San Angelo Standard-Times from February 1982 through March 1984.
He directed coverage of the Jones story from the initial report of the investigation through the conviction in Georgetown in 1984.)