Another Pittsburgh-area nursing home hit with lawsuit for employing nurse accused of killing patients with insulin
Heather Pressdee was charged last May with the deaths of two patients and the hospitalization of a third at Quality Life Services. Now the care home is facing a wrongful death lawsuit.
By Madeline Bartos
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BUTLER, Pennsylvania (KDKA) — Another Pittsburgh-area care home that employed a nurse accused of killing patients with insulin is facing a wrongful death lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Butler on behalf of the family of 43-year-old Nicholas Cymbol, who died on May 1 of last year. The lawsuit alleges Heather Pressdee, a unit manager at the time, injected the 43-year-old with an excessive and lethal dose of insulin.
Heather Pressdee was charged last May with the deaths of two patients and the hospitalization of a third at Quality Life Services, a skilled nursing facility in Chicora. She was later charged with administering excessive doses of insulin to 19 more patients at five different care facilities between 2020 and 2023.
Before Pressdee was hired by Sunnyview, the lawsuit says she had been fired or forced to resign from ten local medical facilities in the span of four years.
In the days leading up to Cymbol’s death, the lawsuit says Pressdee made comments that he “was going to be the next one to die.” Other nurses confronted the Sunnyview administration with their concerns about Pressdee, but the nursing home allowed her to continue as unit manager, lawyers say.
“We were hired by the families of Heather Pressdee’s victims to get answers as to how she was permitted to continue working in these facilities, despite her erratic, disturbing, and abusive behavior,” said Rob Peirce, the managing partner of Robert Peirce and Associates, the firm behind the lawsuit. “The more our office has investigated, the more questions we have as to why these facilities allowed these tragedies to occur.”
The lawsuit against Sunnyview comes on the heels of two earlier this month against Belair Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center on behalf of the families of 79-year-old Jack Rogers and 88-year-old Normal Hendrickson. Robert Peirce and Associates also filed a wrongful death lawsuit for the family of Marianne Bower in October.
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