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A former staffer at a veterans hospital in West Virginia pleaded guilty Tuesday to intentionally killing seven patients with fatal doses of insulin, capping a sweeping federal investigation into a series of mysterious deaths at the medical center. Reta Mays, a former nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg was charged with seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of assault with the intent to commit murder of an eighth person. She faces life sentences for each murder. (Izaguirre, 7/14)

In her three years as a nursing assistant on the overnight shift at the local Veterans Affairs hospital here, Reta Mays tended to elderly veterans with the ailments of old age. She took their vital signs and glucose levels on the graveyard shift, sitting vigil at their bedside while medical staffing was thin. Few saw her go in and out of patients' rooms. No one watched while she injected them with lethal doses of insulin during an 11-month killing rampage in 2017 and 2018, which she admitted to Tuesday in federal court, pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of seven veterans and an intent to murder an eighth who died two weeks later. (Rein and Born, 7/14)