Cops investigate Brooklyn NY nursing home deaths

[cougarnurse]

OK; I have worked LTC before, and believe in the old adage of '3 at a time'. THIS is tooo eerie: Cops investigate Brooklyn nursing home where three patients died within an hour of each other

Detectives are trying to figure out if a Brooklyn nursing home was the scene of a crime - or just an eerie coincidence - after three patients on the same floor died within an hour of each other.

The men - ages 77, 72 and 61 - were all found lifeless Thursday morning in separate rooms on the facility's third floor, officials said.

Though there were no immediate signs of foul play, investigators have sealed off the Carlton Nursing Home in Ft. Greene to interview the medical facility's staff and examine the records of the three men who died.

"It's certainly unusual," said one law enforcement source. "It may be a fluke, but we're not going to quickly chalk it up to weird timing without checking everything out."

Paramedics were first called to the nursing home on Carlton Ave. at 5:42 a.m. by staffers who found that one man had stopped breathing.

The FDNY crew was then called back to the facility at 6:26 a.m. after employees found two more men dead.

Troubled by the unusual rash of deaths and fearing that the home's other residents were in danger, firefighters quickly conducted tests for carbon monoxide and checked out the nursing home's heating system and electronic equipment, a FDNY source said.

Nothing unusual or harmful was found, and a nursing home official scoffed at the notion that the deaths were anything more than a coincidence.

"There's nothing unusual about old people dying," said Lawrence Diamond, medical director of the Carlton Nursing Home. "There's nothing suspicious as far as I'm concerned."

"People are old, people are ill and people pass away," said Diamond. "It's very unfortunate, but there is nothing suspicious about what happens when old people die."

The men were not immediately identified since their families had not been told of their deaths. A law enforcement source said one man had a heart condition, another had advanced diabetes and the third had a terminal illness.

Officials from the city Medical Examiner's office will perform autopsies on the men.

Detectives were interviewing the nurses on duty overnight, and were trying to determine what food and medicine the men had recently ingested.