Life of Dr. Michael Swango Essay
Life of Dr. Michael Swango Essay The acts of Michael Swango best fit the biochemistry crime theory which has many naming: anthropological, genetic, biological and so on. This theory has a connection with the body’s’ morphological structure. The father of modern criminology founded this theory in the year 1876. His name was Cesare Lombroso, who was among the first proponents who sought scientific reasons for crime causes. This scientific method offers opposition to the classical approach based on free will as the major crime cause.
Modern bio-criminology states with ease that dysfunction of body organs and heredity factors influence an individual’s predisposition towards crime (Stewart, 2000). Swango’s criminal predisposition justifies the fact that his father, Virgil Swango, who was a marine officer, left him an odd legacy. This was a scrapbook that contained clips of crimes and grisly road carnages. In addition, Swango’s father who was a colonel, kept till his death a famous picture of Eddie Adams, a national police commander of southern Vietnam, executing a Vietcong member during the offensive of Tet of early 1968.
Moreover, his mother, Muriel, gave him a helping hand in doing his own pasting, scrapbook of car crashes and clipping articles. From the above exposition, it is clear that Swango’s criminal tendencies rallied from his parents through the climate they provided during his growth. Furthermore, Swango and his siblings got trained by their father in obeying different commands of military service such as, saluting and marching in designated formations. Michael Swango was a serial killer in America also a physician by profession. He got convicted with four counts of murder but had an estimated involvement in more than 60 lethal poisoning of his colleagues and patients.
He is serving a life sentence at ADX Florence after imprisonment with no parole possibility. He was brought up at a place called Quincy in Illinois. He was a valedictorian graduate of Quincy catholic boys’ high school class of 1972. The school currently is part of the Quincy Notre dame high school. Swango was a band member of the Quincy Notre dame band since he played the clarinet. His upbringing was Presbyterian despite having schooled in a catholic school. Michael was a serviceman in the Marine Corps where he received an honorable leave upon his discharge. Swango then joined the college of Quincy now referred to as the University of Quincy and later went to the school of medicine at southern Illinois University.
Michael’s woes became prevalent while at the university. Though, being a brilliant student, Swango was all over the institution known as lazy and thus preferred working as an attendant of an ambulance rather than giving concentration to his studies (Binda, 2003). At this young age, he was remarkably fascinated with patients who were dying. Though, no one paid attention to this at the moment, most patients assigned to Swango to do checkups, suffered from life threatening emergencies in the end. At the very least, five of the patients succumbed to death. Swango’s don’t care attitude came in the limelight when he got caught faking checkups while doing his gynecology and obstetrics rotation. Majority of the comrade students had harbored the suspicions of Swango’s faked checkups as early as during his second year at the university. He was saved by one member of the disciplinary committee who voted to give him another chance. During the time, it had to be voted unanimously for the dismissal of a student.
However, serious doubts concerning his competence were raised. Thus, he was allowed to graduate a year after the rest of his course mates had graduated under the condition he does fully many assignments in other study fields and a repetition of gynecology and obstetrics rotation. Though poorly evaluated in the letter from the medical school dean, Michael managed to secure an internship at the medical center of Ohio state university in the capacity of a surgical intern. There happened to be a neurosurgery patient admitted at the facility, and Swango requested a nurse so that he could check on the lady. The patients’ condition got worse after Swango’s check, and the nurse became suspicious about his handling of the patients. Coincidentally, patients who were healthy died mysteriously at an alarming rate particularly on the wing assigned to Swango (Holstege, et al. 2010). This happened when Swango was commissioned to be the floor intern. At one instance, he was caught by a nurse injecting a patient who thereafter got strangely ill.
Nurses who reported these weird tendencies of Swango were accused of being paranoid by the administrators. After the end of his internship, Swango was not hired as a physician because he had done shoddy work at the medical facility. Swango went back to Quincy in the year 1984 and worked as a medical technician of emergencies with ambulance corps of Adams County. This was despite having been fired from another service after making a patient drive to hospital who was suffering from a heart problem. Soon, the staff noticed that many of them became seriously ill whenever food or coffee was prepared by Swango with no clear cause. Later that year the police department of Quincy arrested Swango after some poisons and arsenic was found in his possession.
Swango got convicted the following year for coworker poisoning and got jailed for five years. In the year 1991, he got released and started forging his documents so that he could start practicing his profession once more. Moreover, he even changed his name to Adams J. David and became hired at the medical center of veterans’ affairs, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This position made him somewhat comfortable, and it tempted to seek admission into the American medical association. The association conducted a thorough investigation concerning his credentials, and it is from these investigations that his shortcomings got discovered. This led to his dismissal from the center. Later on he managed to secure another job at the medical center of Northport veterans’ administration. No sooner had he gotten this job as a resident psychiatrist, than patients began dying mysteriously at the facility.
Swango worked peacefully for five months before his immediate former employer learned of his whereabouts and sent a warning to the medical center’s administration. This led to his discharge and a warning circulated to 1000 teaching hospitals and over 125 schools of medicine across the entire nation. In 1994, Swango reappeared in Zimbabwe where he worked in a hospital and once again patients began dying out of unclear circumstances. All these deaths got traced towards him, and it is in Zimbabwe where he got arrested again. Unfortunately, he managed to escape and went into hiding in many African countries and parts of Europe. Michael planned to seek employment in Saudi Arabia and thus in June 1997, he took a flight to Saudi Arabia from Africa. This flight included a layover in Chicago and here the federal agents arrested him. Michael got convicted on July 11, 2000, after admitting his involvement in the death of three patients and variety of charges of fraud. This led to his life imprisonment.
