Man Admits to Administering Lethal Dose of Insulin at Nursing Home

By Thomas Greer | February 2, 2014

The family of Marcelline Katherine Sommer Vale finally has the answer to a question that has been weighing heavily on them since 2007. In 2007, when Vale was a resident at a Louisville nursing home, she died from an overdose of insulin. Vale had not been prescribed insulin, because she did not need it as part of her treatment. Someone had intentionally administered the insulin to Vale, and she eventually died as a result of the damage that it had caused within her body. The police had identified suspects in the case, but were unable to draw any conclusions about who the killer was. Recently, the man who administered the lethal dose of insulin called police and informed them that he was the one who had killed Vale.

While David Trent Satterfield Jr. has been a suspect in Vale’s death for the past seven years, police did not have enough information to arrest him, until now. He had been asked to take a polygraph test in 2007, as part of the investigation into Vale’s death. In 2009, Satterfield was deposed, and during his deposition he remarked that only an amoral person would intentionally give a patient an overdose. He told police that he wanted to come forward and admit to what he had done because he is now terminally ill, and he is filled with remorse for the crime that he committed. Satterfield is currently being held on $50,000.00 cash bond in the Jefferson County Jail, after a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf at his initial court appearance.

Now that Satterfield has disclosed that he killed Marcelline Katherine Sommer Vale, detectives are looking into his past as well as his recent activities to determine whether he has harmed anyone else. Satterfield has lived and worked in Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In Tennessee, he was employed by a temp agency as a certified medical technician, and he was assigned to shifts at several Louisville area nursing homes. When he was identified as a suspect in Vale’s death in 2007, he went to work at a gas station. By 2009, he had returned to working as a technician at another Louisville area nursing home. It is unclear when he was last employed in the medical field, but as of the date of his confession, he had an active state registered nursing assistant license, which was set to expire in 2015.

This case raises the issue of whether nursing homes are hiring staff who pose a danger to their residents. A March 2011 study by the New York Times revealed that approximately ninety percent of nursing homes have at least one person who has been convicted of a crime on their payrolls. There is no federal law requiring nursing homes to perform state or federal criminal background checks on their employees. Thirty three states require employers to check state criminal records, ten states require a check of both state and F.B.I. records, and the remaining seven states do not have any state laws requiring background checks. Nursing home residents are a vulnerable group of people. Placing individuals who have a propensity towards committing crimes in close contact with people who are vulnerable creates a dangerous situation where crime and abuse are likely to occur.

If someone in your family has experienced abuse or neglect while in the care of a nursing home, it is important that you seek the assistance of a skilled nursing home abuse and neglect attorney. The experienced Tennessee nursing home abuse attorneys at Bailey & Greer, PLLC will evaluate your case, answer your questions, and help you choose how you will proceed. Call us today, at 901-680-9777 to make an appointment to discuss your case with us.  At Bailey & Greer, PLLC, we are small enough to care, big enough to fight, and experienced enough to win.

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