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Author Topic: TX nurse Katie Ripstra arrested, accused of poisoning 4 yo daughter with salt  (Read 3374 times)
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MuffyBee
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« on: April 11, 2014, 06:36:53 PM »

   The little four year old girl has suffered brain damage and damage to her veins.  How is this not more like attempted murder or something much more than injury to a child/serious bodily injury?

http://www.wfaa.com/news/crime/Texas-nurse-arrested-accused-of-poisoning-daughter-with-salt.html
Texas nurse arrested, accused of poisoning daughter with salt
Posted April 10, 2014, Updated April 11, 2014

HOUSTON -- A northwest Harris County woman who worked as a pediatric nurse is accused of poisoning her daughter by repeatedly giving her an overdose of salt.
Katie Alice Ripstra, 31, has been charged with injury to a child /serious bodily injury.
Evidence indicates that physical abuse of the now 4-year-old girl started in 2011, Lt. Ruben Diaz of the Harris County Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigations Bureau said.
Investigators said they don’t think Ripstra hurt other children, but for years she would harm her own toddler and then take her to Texas Children’s Hospital, where she worked, for treatments and surgeries.
In one treatment visit in 2013 the child was unconscious and had suffered a brain injury as a result of the unusually high level of salt in her body, Diaz said. The child recovered after treatment that included three days in an intensive care unit. It was one of the child's four or more stays in that hospital in 2013.

One procedure was to install a feeding tube and another was to install a central line into the child’s vein. Authorities said Ripstra used those lines to shoot her daughter full of salt.
 
Children’s Protective Services placed Ripstra’s daughter with a family friend. She has some brain damage and vein problems.

Ripstra was fired from Texas Children’s Hospital. She is out of jail on $30,000 bond. Her next court date is May 20th.
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MuffyBee
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« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2014, 06:38:38 PM »

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2014/04/it_took_removing_a_pre-schoole.php
Authorities Say Nurse Dropped Near-Deadly Amounts of Salt in Daughter's Feeding Tube
April 10, 2014

It took removing a pre-schooler from her mother's care for seven months for authorities to build their case against a mom they say tried to poison her little girl with salt.
Katie Alice Ripstra, 31, was charged this week by the Harris County Sheriff's Office for allegedly poisoning her 4-year-old through a feeding tube the child used. The abuse, according to court records, put the child into the intensive care unit at Texas Children's Hospital last year and caused brain damage.

According to a sheriff's office investigator, the child had been abused since 2011. An affidavit of probable cause says the child had been admitted several times to TCH with extremely high sodium levels. In August, she was admitted with a level as high as 186 milliequivalents per liter. The normal range for blood sodium levels is 135 to 145 milliequivalents per liter according to National Library of Medicine.
The little girl made a total of four trips to the children's last year, recovering each time from sodium levels higher than 150 milliequivalents per liter.

What's puzzling is that Ripstra was a pediatric nurse at the hospital, but investigators haven't revealed why she would have been doing this to her own kid, who according to court documents used a gastric feeding tube.

Court records say that after a meeting in the summer that involved the hospital's child abuse team, Ripstra was confronted about the levels of sodium. The doctor handling the case, according to the affidavit, said Ripstra was introducing the high levels of sodium through her daughter's feeding tube on purpose.

The child was in intensive care for three days and suffered brain damage due to her sodium levels when she was admitted again on August 6. Child protective services began investigating following that visit and the child was placed in someone else's custody the following month.
 
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« Reply #2 on: April 13, 2014, 04:56:53 PM »

has anyone read why this precious child was on a feeding tube to begin with?
I can't seem to find an answer.

 
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