A former Ohio State medical intern, Dr. Michael Swango, has been charged in the killing of five patients in Zimbabwe, the Associated Press reported on Sunday.Swango has been awaiting trial in Long Island, N.Y., for fraud charges. The trial is slated to start on March 2. Zimbabwe reportedly may consider asking extradition after the trial on the fraud charges.Swango worked in Zimbabwe from 1994 to 1996.Five deaths that occurred at OSU hospitals while Swango was an intern were investigated after he left. He was at OSU in 1983-84. Events surrounding Swango that were called “questionable incidents” occurred during his year-long surgical residency in 1983, according to a report compiled by Edward Morgan, Franklin County assistant prosecuting attorney.When asked to verify Swango’s dates of employment, Dave Sammons of the hospital’s record office said, “We have no record of him.” When asked repeatedly, he said, “Given the conditions that he left (under) I’d say something happened to his file.”Swango, a high school valedictorian, left OSU in 1984 after the first year of a five-year residency. Almost a year later, an investigation was begun into five deaths that occurred in the area of the hospital where Swango was stationed, the ninth floor of Rhodes Hall. The investigation was not instituted by the hospital, but by OSU police and the Franklin County prosecutor’s office at the request of a police department in Illinois. The report determined any wrongdoing on Swango’s part could not be proved because of a lack of evidence. The report stated a syringe, which Swango allegedly used, was collected by a nurse, given to another nurse, then discarded after several months because no investigators had requested it as evidence.Of the five instances that occurred over a three-week period between January 1983 and February 1984, only one resulted in the ruling of a homicide by the Franklin County coroner’s office.In one case, a 19-year-old female patient who was “not expected to die at this time,” died of cardiopulmonary arrest due to early pneumonia, according to a report by Edward Morgan, Franklin County assistant prosecutor. Morgan based his report on interviews with the hospital staff. A nurse who was quoted in the report said Swango left the nurses station at 11:30 p.m. after saying he was going to draw blood from the patient. A half hour later, the nurse went to check on the patient because of a fever that had been noted earlier. The nurse described the patient as having a “pale, dusty bluish look.” The nurse found no breathing and called a code blue, which means breathing has stopped. Swango was not one of the doctors that responded to the code. Later, the nurse remembers Swango saying that either he did not or could not draw blood from the patient. According to the prosecutor’s report, OSU police determined a year later that no one tried to save the syringe that Swango reportedly had, nor had anyone interviewed Swango or the nurse.One nurse quoted in the report said there were more codes in the month that Swango was stationed in that area than in the entire previous year. In another instance six days later, Swango was among a group of doctors making rounds, which involved visiting each room to check on the condition of patients. Swango was the first to report the death of a patient in the room, according to a doctor quoted in the report. Although the doctors had entered the room, they were talking and hadn’t yet examined any patients. It was Swango, the doctor said, who left the group and first noticed the patient wasn’t breathing. The dead patient was last seen by a respiratory therapist an hour before who said in the report that he was “surprised” by the death because the patient had been fine an hour earlier. Swango contacted the patient’s family and they came in and requested an autopsy, but one was never completed, according to the report. In another case, a patient was found by a nurse after she had stopped breathing. After she was revived, the patient wanted to say something, according to nurses in the report. Because of a tube down her throat, she was unable to speak. A nurse gave the patient a piece of paper and a pencil. The patient then wrote, “He put something in my IV,” according to the report.During the code blue emergency, while nurses and doctors had been reviving the patient, another nurse saw Swango exit another room a “few minutes” later with a “goofy look on his face. I mean it was basically a ****-eating grin,” the nurse said in the report.Swango is currently awaiting trial in New York for allegedly misrepresenting himself on a job application and allegedly dispensing controlled substances illegally at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Long Island. When he interviewed with the veterans hospital, he told administrators that his time spent in prison was a result of a “bar room brawl,” instead of the actual reason, an incident in which he poisoned six co-workers, said Cecilia Gardner, the assistant U.S. attorney heading the case. The second charge is a result of prescribing medication when he was not actually qualified to practice medicine under federal law because of the conviction. Because the veterans hospital is a not a state agency, Swango is being charged by the federal government, Gardner said.Gardner could not comment on the case in Long Island because “the investigation is continuing.” Gardner declined to comment on whether or not Swango’s alleged behavior at OSU was being cited in the case against him in Long Island. Swango’s controversy started years before he went to New York.After leaving OSU, Swango began working as a paramedic at Blessing Hospital in Quincy, Ill. It was here that he was convicted of aggravated battery for adding arsenic to food that he brought for his fellow paramedics. “Clearly he wasn’t trying to kill them,” said Judge Dennis Cashman, who sentenced Swango to jail for the poisonings. Instead, Cashman said Swango enjoyed bringing people to near death and then asking about their symptoms. “He called them regularly to find out what their symptoms were.”Cashman said he handed down the maximum sentence allowed.He said that part of Swango’s later success at obtaining jobs despite his prison record was because of his good looks and charm. “He’s very superficially charming. He was outgoing and gregarious. But he’s actually a very dangerous person.”Swango was able to be paroled after serving only half of his sentence because of a since discontinued Illinois law that allowed for one day of “good behavior” to equal one day off of a person’s sentence. “Of course he had good behavior. He played the game by the rules,” Cashman said.Police searched Swango’s apartment in Illinois. They found mice poison, over a dozen “Terro Ant Poison” bottles, some of which were empty, castor beans, roach powder, syringes, a container of sulfuric acid, and other chemicals. In addition, police found two books called Weaponeer and Poor Man’s James Bond. The first book detailed how to extract Ricin, a poison, from castor beans. Police also found handwritten cards that summed up how to extract the Ricin from the beans, according to the prosecutor’s report. Other cards focused on satanism, how to make supersaturated cyanide and how to generate botulism, a type of food poisoning.Swango later testified in Quincy, Ill., that the poisons came from a chemistry set he purchased in Columbus. He also said while on the witness stand that the cards with handwritten notes about Ricin were a result of an interest he had developed after completing a research project on castor beans as a senior at Quincy College and from newspaper articles on the beans.