My name is Joan Brunson. I am the wife of the deceased Pastor Victor Brunson.  He contracted COVID-19, and at the time, he was a little overweight of high blood pressure and cholesterol issues.  He had allergies, but he was healthy, strong as an ox.  Victor was my provider and my caretaker.  He was the love of my life for the first time in my life.

I took him to the hospital in Florence, South Carolina, because he was feeling bad.  He was having body pains, and he was getting a fever, and we didn’t know what to do.  He was told by the person that he was with, because they both contracted COVID-19, that he could get a infusion.  We went to the hospital seeking the infusion.  Hospital staff made me leave; could not stay with him, so I left him sitting in the hospital by himself in a waiting room for other people who had COVID-19.  I myself had COVID-19 as well that I contracted from him.

I kept calling the hospital and finally someone talk to me, and said they was going to keep him.  They were admitting him because they wanted to observe him, and make sure his temperature didn’t get any higher, and he agreed and so did I.

Three days later, I was calling his phone, but it was dead.  I was calling the nurse station constantly, and every time I called, she would say the doctor’s in the room with another patient.  I left messages after message after message, and couldn’t figure out why he was not returning any of my calls, letting me know what was going with my husband.

My husband texted me on his phone, and said he was so thirsty he just wanted something to drink.  He asked if I could go and get him something like sweet tea from McDonald’s.  I was in quarantine, so I called another church member and the church member went and got two large sweet teas from McDonald’s.  They refuse to let him drink it, and when I call and ask did he get, it the nurse said that he couldn’t have none of that stuff.

Christmas Day, the nurse from my job took him a meal and a drink, and they wouldn’t let him have it.  They said that he couldn’t eat or drink.  My husband texted me and said the doctor was being very nasty and rude, and was threatening to shove something down his throat.  He refused to have anything put in his throat, and he refused the ventilator because he felt like they was going to put him on the ventilator and then kill him.

The doctor had the nurse call me and tell me that I could override his decision.  I refused to override his decision as long as he was in his right mind.  They got angry. They got nasty with me and my husband.  The doctor said he will not question about it there, and so I said, “Okay. What about the ventilator?”  Then he said, “The ventilator can’t even save him.  You don’t seem to understand.”  I told him about God and our beliefs that I’m not trying to disrespect him.  He replied, “I’m trying to get you to see that he’s not going to live.”  It was like he was doing and the atmosphere and everything was against him.

He asked me to take him home.  He said, “If you don’t, they’re going to kill me.  He said God already showed it to me in a dream, and I was dead.”   I talked him out of that knowing that he was a man of faith.  I told him it was the medication that had him hallucinating, and that I was not going to let anything happen to him.  He said, “You sure?”  I said,” I promise you that I’m not going to leave your side.”  I wouldn’t even go get something to eat. I stayed there the whole time.  The only time I wasn’t in his presence was when I went to the bathroom.  That was the 29th.

That same day, the nurse asked me about “helping him,” and I thought it was stupid. You know, I didn’t tell her that.  I just said, we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want help.  We’re relying on y’all to help us, and she said okay.  I had no idea her idea of helping him was to kill him.  Once she did it, she told me she thought that that was what I wanted her to do. That she was trying to help me and him.

She promised me that she gave him enough morphine that he did not feel it.  He did not know what happened.  I know he didn’t feel it, because as soon as she gave him that shot, he flipped over.  I was so stupid, I thought she gave him something to make him sleep.  I started praising God.  Then I saw the machines.  They were set to end of life, so they didn’t go off a beat, but everything was zeroed out.  It was just lines up there.  When I called her back, I was like why are the machines are saying that?   She said, “Because, he passed.”  I was like, well why wouldn’t nobody help him?  She answered, “Because I gave him something so he wouldn’t suffer.”  When I asked her, “What did you give him?”  She said, “An overdose of morphine, and I promise you he did not feel anything.”

I just look at her, and I was in so much in shock.  I said to the nurse, “You killed my husband!” She said, “I thought that was what you wanted.”  I was in so much shock and disbelief.  Mercy killing is illegal in South Carolina, and I just stood there.  She started crying and apologizing and saying that she would not have done it if she know I was not in agreement.  How can I be in agreement with something when you say you want me to help him?  You didn’t say anything about death.

I’m still on antidepressants, and it’s been two years.  I still cry almost everyday.  My husband was 6 years younger than me. and he provided for me.  I have to worry about paying the bills I have to try to do everything.  I have a lot of medical issues. I just got out the hospital yesterday. Hope it didn’t kill me at home by myself.  Why would it kill him in the hospital full of doctors?

Then I started researching and looking things up after it was too late, and I realized all the millions of people that died.  None of them was at home.  If COVID-19 killed that many people, we should have been finding bodies on the street.  Everybody died in the hospital.  Everybody got worse in the hospital.  Everybody got better who stayed home.

COVID-19 didn’t kill my loved one. The nurse that worked at McLeod Hospital did, because they didn’t believe what we believe.  They didn’t have the right to take all belief or our free will. The death certificate got so much stuff right on phone that I know is not true.  I went to his doctor’s office, and tried to get his medical records from them to prove how healthy he was.

My husband was a truck driver, and he had just gotten a new job and anytime you get a job, CDL drivers have to have a physical.  He passed his physical, and he was supposed to start the new job the same week that he went into the hospital.  He would have never been approved if he had all the stuff that they wrote up on that death certificate.

When I tried to find out why he had these issues, and when they come, because he didn’t have it prior to this.  No one would give me an answer, and his regular doctors wouldn’t give me his records even though I was his next of kin.  The only records I could get was from the hospital, and I had to go there twice.  Both times, they told me it was a complete record, but it’s not because of the days of missing dates out of it.

Even at one point, it is calling him a female, a different age, and the stuff that they’re talking about doesn’t even apply to him.  I’m wondering, did they give him someone else’s medication?   What all happened to him, and why I could not see him until two days before he passed?

Y’all decided that he was going to pass.  In other words, they was letting me say “goodbye,” and I didn’t have enough sense to know that my husband was in his right mind.  He was talking.  He was alert.  This should not have happened.

I did talk to one attorney in Florence, and he told me that I didn’t have a case, because I would have had to proven that he wasn’t going to die anyway.  That I only had two years to take it to court, and after two years, there would be nothing I could do about it.  He was not going to take the case.  The attorney said he did believe that he was murdered, but he did believe also that he would not be able to prove it, so it was not worth his time.  He is also a city councilman here in Florence, South Carolina.  McLeod  Hospital is so big, I didn’t talk to anyone else because I knew that no one here would go up against them.

It’s not like I was home when my husband died, and I’m assuming these things happened.  I was actually there, and I witnessed it.  The lady come fast to me, and when my son got there, he couldn’t believe what I was saying, so he called the nurse, and she told him the same exact thing that she thought that I authorized her to take his life.  When I told her, “No I didn’t, don’t tell him that.”  Then she said that what she thought I was doing, and I told her I would never ever authorize you or anyone else to take my husband’s life, even if he had to suffer.  I loved him so much I would have let him suffer, because I believe with all my heart that God was going to make a miracle happen, and that was going to be his testimony. The sad part is my husband believed the same thing.  That was going to be his testimony.

We made promises to each other that we was going to do better.  Our Christmas present was we were going to make Christmas when he got home.  I didn’t open any the gifts.  His birthday was three days before Christmas.  His death day was four days after Christmas.  Christmas Day, he sent me a text, and he called me.   He couldn’t have talked, because he couldn’t catch his air, his breath.  He said, nobody came in his room all day on Christmas.  Not a nurse, not a doctor not nobody.  He needed assistance, and he was saying that he wanted to report them.  I talk him out of it, because it was Christmas, and because I was afraid that if he made too much noise up there by himself that they would do something to him.

There was nobody there to help or that they would make it worse for him.  I was wrong on so many levels, and every day, I have to live with the fact that I can’t get out of my head – the nurse saying I told her to do it  – that she didn’t kill him.  I did.  Wow!   My doctor says that I know that’s not true, and it shouldn’t bother me, but it does more than that the fact that I promised him I wouldn’t let the staff do anything to him him.

I was willing to fight COVID-19, but we aren’t willing to fight the hospital.  If I had known that, I would have taken him home that same day.  Please help me.  He’s gone, but please help him, too.  Don’t let his death be in vain. Don’t let them have the right to take his life, and not be accountable for it.  How many other people that was up there by themselves that she gave overdoses to?  There was no one with the other people to witness it.  How do you go against a hospital that owns half of the town, when you are struggling just to make it everyday?   Now you are by yourself, and you got a feeling for yourself.