Nurse Killed Protecting Patients From Knifeman

A Texas nurse's final act was to protect her patients as a knifeman ran amok at a medical center. Gail Sandidge went to help when she heard screams at Longview's Good Shepherd Medical Center, located about 120 miles southeast of Dallas. She was fatally stabbed in the chest by an assailant who wounded four other people, one of them critically, CNN reports. "Nurses are protectors by nature. And Gail, she fit that profile," the hospital's president says. "She was protecting her patients in an act of courage today, and in so doing, she lost her life."

He described the nurse, who the AP reports had been on the hospital's staff since 1978, as a "seamstress, a Sunday-school teacher of 2-year-olds, a huge Baylor fan, a mother, a grandmother, a healer, a trainer, a mentor, a nurturer." A 22-year-old suspect was arrested near the hospital and has been charged with first-degree murder. Witnesses say the attacker ran through the surgical center saying "You're not going to kill my mother" and brandishing a hunting knife. "He had a death grip on the knife and he was just muttering and his eyes were kind of wild-looking," a witness tells KLTV. (More nurse stories.)