Janice Trahan Allen Obituary: Louisiana communities are mourning the death of a longtime fighter, mother, resident, and former nurse who passed away unexpectedly this week. Janice Trahan Allen died suddenly this week from HIV and Dementia complications. She was surrounded by her loved ones.
Janice Trahan Allen was the former Lafayette, LA ER nurse whose story was in the E9 “Shot of Vengeance”. Allen’s ex-lover Doctor Richard Schmidt, a gastroenterologist, injected her with HIV and Hepatitis C in 1994, after she broke up with him.
Full Story of Doctor Who Injected Ex-Mistress with HIV, Died in Prison
Janice Trahan had been feeling under the weather in the final months of 1994. The young nurse sought a doctor to determine the origin of her symptoms, which included swollen glands, eye pain, and recurrent bodily aches.
The doctor administered a full battery of testing. One test revealed that she was pregnant. She found out she had HIV from another person. It was suspected that she contracted the virus and hepatitis C while working at a hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana. However, hospital records could only corroborate one incident: an AIDS patient accidentally doused her with saliva. She tested negative after that.
HIV tests on the guys in her life revealed no positive results. It was unclear how she had contracted the infections. Trahan then recalled a peculiar episode with the man who had been her lover for a decade, Dr. Richard Schmidt, 48, a highly regarded Lafayette gastroenterologist.
Who Was Janice Trahan Allen?
Trahan and Schmidt met on the job in the early 1980s and soon began sleeping together. Both were married to different persons. Trahan divorced her husband and moved into an apartment where Schmidt could see her whenever he wanted, convinced that she and the doctor would be happy together. Then she waited for him to take the next step, which was to leave his wife and three children and start a new life with her.
What Happened To Janice Trahan Allen ?
The Acadiana High School graduate suffeed from dementia. Janice Trahan Allen was a warrior, she took her medications and stayed healthy while living with the ill-gotten diseases. She passed away thirty years later. Allen outlived her enemy, a neighbor wrote.
Years passed without any change in status. Still, she waited. She remained hopeful even after being pregnant four times, and Schmidt insisted on abortions, according to Trahan. Trahan terminated three pregnancies. However, she refused with the fourth and gave birth to a son.
More years have passed. Trahan began dating other men, and her attempts to break free irritated her slow-moving doctor. He promised to fix her so no one else would want her, Trahan recalled later. Men she dated reported death threats from Schmidt, who cautioned them not to get near her again. She finally had enough and kicked him out. Soon, she fell in love with the man she would later marry.
Janice Trahan Allen Continued Relationship After Marrying Another Man
But Trahan did not dismiss the doctor right away. The romance may have ended, but Schmidt was also providing medical care, notably vitamin B-12 injections. So she was astonished but not afraid when she awoke on the night of August 4, 1994, to find Schmidt standing by her bedside while she slept with the couple’s 3-year-old son. He was holding a syringe filled with a pale pink fluid. He claimed it included her vitamins.
A Shot of Vengeance”
Trahan felt a searing agony when he poked her with the needle, unlike what she had felt from regular pick-me-up doses. As soon as he drained the fluid from the syringe, he told her that the hospital needed him and raced out the door. Months later, beset by weird health difficulties, she saw another doctor and discovered the terrible reality. Her HIV status prompted the difficult decision to abort her pregnancy.
After ruling out other probable sources of infection, Trahan called the district attorney to express her concerns. Her theory: Schmidt, enraged by her desire to leave him, attempted to assassinate her with an incurable fatal illness. The idea appeared outlandish until investigators began investigating. After searching Schmidt’s office and medical records, they discovered a log from the day of the injection. It detailed blood taken from a patient with full-blown AIDS. Another item in the same log described drawing blood from a woman with hepatitis C.
According to Schmidt’s records, neither patient’s blood had been sent for laboratory testing. Trahan’s charge was corroborated by circumstantial evidence, but it was insufficient to secure a conviction. Prosecutors faced the difficult burden of demonstrating that her virus came from Schmidt’s patient.
They turned to science. At the time, genetic fingerprinting was becoming a valuable tool in criminal investigations. In previous situations, the procedure was mostly utilized to exclude or link a person to a violent crime using human blood or other tissues. In the instance of Schmidt, scientists would have to examine genetic material from a non-human source, a virus. Making such a relationship is especially difficult with HIV, which rapidly and easily changes its profile as it goes from host to host and continues to mutate in each new victim.
Schmidt’s trial began in October 1998, and scientists presented findings based on a novel method known as phylogenetic analysis, which had never been utilized in a US courtroom before. The researchers were seeking for commonalities between the two sets of viruses that would indicate that the version in Trahan’s blood originated in the AIDS patient, who donated a blood sample for study.
Research Intervened In Investigation
A molecular researcher at the University of Texas told the court that the germs were “as closely related as viruses from two people could be.” Another researcher stated that Trahan’s infection had a one-in-a-million chance of being caused by someone other than Schmidt’s patient.
Along with the circumstantial evidence and Trahan’s accounts of her former flame’s erratic behavior, the genetic tests resulted in a verdict of guilty of second-degree attempted murder. It earned Schmidt a sentence of half a century behind bars. Several appeals in which he challenged the science were unsuccessful. He died in prison in March of this year. The target of his germ warfare attack outlived him.
Killer Dr. Richard Schmidt Dies
The doctor who injected his former mistress, Janice Trahan, with HIV and Hepatitis C in 1994, died on February 12, 2023, in a Baton Rouge hospital while still in the Department of Corrections’ custody. In 1998, he was convicted and sentenced to 50 years hard labour in Louisiana. Schmidt was denied parole in 2015 but is eligible for early release in 2023. Thankfully, the only early release he received was to the graves.
Janice Trahan Allen Obituary and Funeral Arrangements will be Released by the Family
