SEBASTIAN — “It’s been a rough week,” said Sebastian River Medical Center Certified Nursing Assistant Nicole Yorks as a small group of Diana Duve’s co-workers gathered after a candlelight vigil last Friday night to remember their slain friend and three other local women killed late last month.
“The night shift is very close; It’s been very difficult” since Duve didn’t show up for her shift on June 22, the Sunday night after she went missing.
She had left What-A-Tavern in Vero Beach early Friday morning with on-again, off-again boyfriend Michael Jones.
Duve’s absence has left a gaping hole in the gang that keeps the hospital running overnight.
Hospital administrators called in grief counselors when the news hit that Duve, missing for three days, had been found beaten and strangled to death in the trunk of her car in the parking lot of a Melbourne Publix.
In the wee hours while patients slumbered, the night-shift nurses have a bit more time to get to know each other.
Looking back, none of the four said they had any inkling that Duve was in an abusive relationship, or even a rocky one.
Veteran RN Janet Palenik said nurses encounter victims of domestic violence on a regular basis.
“The animals that do this, they need to be taught to just stop. I have not worked in the emergency room, but you see it,” she said.
She said patients often confide in nurses and trust them enough to share their current or past struggles with abusers.
“Nurses are required to take a domestic violence course as part of their license,” said Rhonda Marples, an RN who serves as Infection Control Coordinator for the hospital.
Marples said all the nurses are taught to recognize the signs that a woman is being battered or bullied by an intimate partner.
None of the four night-shift co-workers who came out to grieve for Duve at the candlelight vigil had noticed even one sign that led them to worry about Duve or her well-being.
“She was excited,” Yorks said. “Just a couple of weeks ago they went for a vacation; she said they were going to the Keys.” No missed shifts, no showing up late for work. No unexplained injuries or “accidents.” No distress, crying or drama.
In fact, Duve’s smile and cheerful, caring demeanor will be sorely missed around the nurses’ station and in the corridors, Marples said.
Palenik agreed with Marples that nursing was truly Duve’s calling.
“She was so ready to start her career, she was so young,” Palenik, a 32-year veteran Registered Nurse said.
Respiratory therapist John Christoffersen said, “Diana was an amazing nurse – sweet, caring and hard-working. She never gave up on a patient.”
None of the four co-workers had ever met Jones, who now sits in the Indian River County Jail facing first-degree murder charges.
The middle of the night is not the time a lot of friends or family stop by for lunch, plus Duve relished spending her lunch breaks with her aunt, Mila Murphy, also a Registered Nurse on Sebastian’s night shift.
Murphy, like Duve and her mother Lena Andrews, immigrated to the United States from the family’s homeland of Moldova.
“I can’t imagine what her family is going through,” Palenik said.