Michael J. Swango, a former medical resident at the Ohio State University Medical Center, was charged Tuesday with the killing of three patients at a veterans hospital in Northport, N.Y. The charges came just three days before Swango was to be released from a federal prison in Florence, Colo., where he has been serving time on a fraud conviction.Swango left OSU in 1984 after the first year of a five-year residency. Almost a year later, a federal investigation began into five deaths that occurred in the area of the hospital where Swango was stationed, the ninth floor of Rhodes Hall.”He was to be released Saturday, July 15,” said Rod Chandler of the Federal Correctional Institution in Florence, Colo. “But, we don’t release inmates on weekends or holidays.” According to the Associated Press, in lieu of his release, Swango will be transferred to New York to face his latest charges in federal court.Swango is currently serving a 42-month term after being nabbed in 1997 by immigration officials at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He was charged and eventually convicted of violating federal fraud laws.Swango lied on an application to a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, N.Y., covering up the fact that he spent time in prison for poisoning co-workers at an ambulance company in Illinois in 1985. At the time he was apprehended, the fraud charge was the only way federal officals could convict him.While he has been behind bars, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs, have both been working on building a murder case against Swango, which recently culminated with the new charges.”There is a pending matter in many jurisdictions,” said Kurt Collins, with the FBI in Columbus. “I doubt if you’ll get anyone to comment on it.”Swango is under investigation in five states, including Ohio, and any details of the case, if revealed to the public, could hurt the FBI’s chances of conviction, according to Collins. “When things finally get into a court situation, then there will be information availiable,” Collins said.Before the murder case was compiled against Swango, many people felt that upon his release Swango would be back in the health care field. Dr. Donald Boyanowski, the associate executive director of OSU’s University Hospital, during the time that Swango spent there as an intern in the 1980s agrees. “I think we’re releasing a serial killer,” Boyanowski said. “He certainly will be a danger to society.” In early Febuary of 1984, OSU nurses observed Swango performing curious injections on two recovering patients, shortly before they stopped breathing and turned blue in the face.One of these patients was successfully resuscitated, while the other eventually died.”There were two witnesses that suspected homicide,” Boyanowski said. “If there is a suspicious death in the hospital, it is typically the job of doctors and administration to gather information about the circumstances, but not when there is an accusation of homicide.”In spite of what Boyanowski expressed as policy, the hospital kept the investigation of Swango on an internal level, refusing to involve law enforcemnet officials. Not until 1985, when Illinois police conducted a background check to help their poisoning case against Swango, did OSU police learn about the mysterious incidents at University Hospital.Former OSU police chief, Peter Herdt, refused to comment on his involvement in the Swango case according to his lawyer’s advice. “My job was to keep the integrity of the police force,” Herdt said.”I don’t think there was an attempt to cover it up,” Boyanowski said, “but the University Hospital, by conducting an inside investigation, was very foolish, they should have had outside help. There was more done to protect the resident than to protect the patients.”Although Swango was allowed to complete his internship, the residency in neurosurgery that was originally to follow the internship, was declined.Late last year, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter, James B. Stewart, released a book detailing the trail of hospital deaths that followed Swango through five states and two continents. Stewart’s work, “Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder,” has fueled the fire of the Swango controversy, and media interest is now peaking with his release date nearing.Chandler said that Swango is getting a lot of attention from the press, but, “denies all media contact for interviews.””He keeps to himself,” Chandler said. “He’s just a model inmate, not any better or any worse than any other inmate.”