Will nurse be held to a higher standard?
By SUE CARLTON
Published October 6, 2007
PANAMA CITY
It was an odd moment outside the courthouse.
During a lunch break in the boot camp trial this week, as people filtered out into the sun, Martin Lee Anderson's mother and her friends stopped to form a small prayer circle.
They held hands there on the steps, a deep-voiced reverend among them praying aloud as people passed by.
Then through the courthouse doors came nurse-turned-manslaughter-defendant Kristin Schmidt.
In that now-infamous video, she is the one in white lab coat and stethoscope, watching as the guards strike the boy, as he goes limp, as they hold his mouth and force him to breathe in ammonia.
When Schmidt saw the prayer circle, she drew back, then hurried toward the parking lot. She passed within inches of Anderson's mother, who did not see her, her eyes closed in prayer.
As Schmidt went by she held up a hand, palm up like a traffic cop saying stop, as if to ward off something.
* * *
I always thought they would turn on the nurse.
Surely she is the most intriguing of the accused, the lone woman amid seven burly drill instructors surrounding 14-year-old Anderson that morning.
More important, she was the medical professional on the scene. Shouldn't she have told them what could happen?
A lawyer for one guard made noises like that early on: "I certainly think she's largely responsible for it," Waylon Graham said last year. "These officers look to her for guidance, and she failed them miserably."
Fast-forward to the trial and a defense as unified as a brick wall: Defiant teenagers in boot camp routinely whined, faked pain, said they couldn't do pushups and laps, refused to comply. How could they know this lanky kid would be any different?
"Did he have a problem?" defense lawyer Robert Pell said in his opening. "Or was he playing possum and waiting to make his move?"
Except it turned out this one wasn't malingering. He was getting ready to die.
Maybe to blame the nurse who stood there, hands on hips, is to admit they did something wrong, something she should have warned them against. To point at her would be to stray from their steadfast assertion that what killed Anderson was something they could not have possibly known: his genetic sickle cell trait.
How will the women on the jury see Schmidt, a Pennsylvania-born mother of two, a petite, ordinary-looking 54-year-old woman you might see at the grocery? Will they hold her to a higher bar, wonder why some maternal instinct did not make her say: stop?
* * *
In a pink house on the edge of the cemetery where Anderson is buried, his grandmother, Reto Williams, watches it on CourtTV.
Sometimes she prays for the witnesses. The world is small. It turns out she is a retired nurse herself. It's a calling, she says, a gift. It's about dignity.
"She didn't treat Martin with dignity," she says when I ask about Schmidt. "He was just another kid."