[mpimping]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,330536,00.html

[Year's_End]

what is it. I'm too lazy to click.

[MTV]

1) Psychologist killed in New York
2) Pennsylvania man questionned about the murder.
3) Too lazy to read further...

[OC Guy]

DAMN i hate shitty thread titles.

[mpimping]

somebody hack their therapist to death and is still on the loose...

[Year's_End]

Originally Posted by OC 335i

DAMN i hate shitty thread titles.

lol +1

[Year's_End]

Originally Posted by mpimping

somebody hack their therapist to death and is still on the loose...

Oh man that's messed up.

[mpimping]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/nyregion/16slay.html

page 1

As part of an expansive effort to catch a knife-wielding attacker, police officials confronted a thorny legal hurdle on Friday as they sought the medical records of an Upper East Side therapist who was slain and those of a colleague who was wounded rushing to her aid.

Three days after the attack, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the police and the Manhattan district attorney’s office were trying to get a court order that would allow investigators to go through the patient files — up to 1,000 of them — of the slain therapist, Kathryn Faughey, and the wounded man, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, in the hope that one could provide evidence leading to the killer.

The police need a court order because of laws designed to guard patients’ privacy. While privacy rules have often vexed law enforcement, Mr. Kelly said he believed the police move to get the files was without precedent.

Still, the police said they were far from determining that the killer was a patient of either doctor. Throughout Friday, investigators checked neighborhood security cameras, analyzed forensic evidence, and tried to reach out to the therapists’ patients by phone to make sure they had not been harmed. No arrests have been made.

“There’s a big forensic aspect to this case,” said Mr. Kelly. “Forensics, we believe, will play an important part in solving this case.”

Mr. Kelly also gave new specifics of the minutes leading up to the killing on Tuesday night, revealing that the killer sat in the waiting room of the East 79th Street office with a female patient for roughly half an hour. After the patient went into Dr. Shinbach’s office, the killer went into Dr. Faughey’s office, although it was unclear whether he went in immediately or waited.

Mr. Kelly said the police were looking for ways to get the patient information they needed despite the stringent state and federal confidentiality laws. Dr. Faughey’s husband, Walter Adam, said on Thursday that he had given the police permission to take his wife’s patient logbooks from her office and home.

The police were also reaching out to Dr. Shinbach’s patients. “We have asked Dr. Shinbach’s assistant to call patients and make certain that they are well, that nothing untoward has happened to them,” Mr. Kelly said. “So that is going forward.”

Investigators said that they were already working on getting the names and addresses of Dr. Faughey’s patients, which they believed they could get without going through a judge. They could ask for the names from Dr. Faughey’s associates, with or without a subpoena from the district attorney, a law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize the investigation.

“With patient names and addresses and things, you’ve got a leg up,” the official said.

Looking into patient files, however, may be much trickier, the official said, because of the doctor-patient confidentiality rules and the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

“The issue is: Is there a reason to break the privilege and can we find a way to do it?” the official said of the patient files. “It would be easier if we had evidence pointing to a single individual, as opposed to hundreds of patients.”

One exception to the doctor-patient privilege, the official said, would be to save lives, if investigators could show that there would be an “imminent threat” unless a file were opened.

Barbara Thompson, a spokesman for the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, declined to comment on the efforts, other than to say that investigators had “already obtained a great deal of patient information” through other methods.

Among the possibilities investigators are pursuing: the assailant was a patient at the offices where Dr. Faughey, Dr. Shinbach and three other health care professionals worked; he was a relative of a patient there or was somehow involved with one; he was someone Dr. Faughey knew outside of her professional life.

On Thursday, the police spoke to a Pennsylvania man, William Kunsman, whom Dr. Faughey and Mr. Adam met at a guitar camp six years ago. He was never described as a suspect. When the interrogation ended, after about eight hours, the issue of patient records rose more to the fore. Investigators had found Mr. Kunsman’s name in an exchange of e-mail messages in Dr. Faughey’s computer.