drank it and ten minutes later he was vomiting. she looks at me and says, i think mike is behind this. every time he s around people are getting sick. he s the only one not getting sick. don t take anything from mike. no way. it was hard to accept. if you knew mike you would never have guessed him to do something like? michael swango seemed to get long with his coworkers fine. he had and odd sense of humor. it would turn the stomach of most people. he had this intense fascination with death and dying. i recall one time i m on a call with him and he says brent was your favorite or ultimate ambulance call. he said mine would be a busload of children hitting head on with a tanker truck, the blast blowing kids up against barb
work. but he went into the va for his checkups and stuff like that. he was there for an examination. he was fairly healthy. then all of a sudden, he got sick when he was there. and the nurse had told us that he had a staph infection in the brain. and they put him in icu. every time we went up to visit him, he was telling us that there was a doctor that went by his room every single night, pushing a cart, and pointing at him saying, you re next. he was just a young, nice-looking doctor who we now know is michael swango.
and his civil rights restored by the government of virginia, which i thought was kind of interesting. i don t think a governor of virginia can do that, since it was an illinois case, but he did a lot of things like that and they bought it all the time. swango s lieing wasn t just bad judgment. if you lie on a federal job application, it s actually a felony, punishable by time in prison. there was a flat-out lie to a federal agent, in this case the head doctor at the hospital where he was interviewed. if you lie on your application, that s a false statement to the government. something we call 18 usc 1001, a false statement charge. it s like one of the mildest felonies we charge people with, but that would be something we could at least capture him with. and we knew he was much more dangerous than that. the government had an abundance of concern that he would continue to poison people, continue to murder people.
and i kept asking him, and he gave a variety of excuses. to such an extent that by the time we got to the labor hearing, i was starting to question the veracity of what he s saying. the fbi learned that during the two years that dr. michael swango lived in africa, he not only worked for but also volunteered at several hospitals throughout zimbabwe. and the alleged misdeeds were not just happening inside hospital walls. here s a guy who has been poisoning people around the united states, now in africa. he showed himself to use arsenic in the quincy case. so right away, you know that s something you re always going to have to look for. we found five girlfriends. we asked them, when you were with him, did you ever get sick? one by one they all went, wait a minute, oh my god. and they realized they had the same symptoms as all these others who were poisoned with
eager guy always in a good mood and i was surprised to hear he wasn t going to go continuing his residency and they let him go y. did they let him go? we interviewed every nurse in the hospital. we asked tell me what you know about michael swango. we got tidbits he ran in and out of a patient s room, the patient was dead. about there were four deaths on the floor where he was working. they were all circumstances, but one thing in common was swango was near them as a doctor at some point. he wasn t even their doctor. he was just near them, in the ward. such is the case of cindy mcgee. cindy was on her bicycle and a