DPH Staff Spotlight: Laboratory Professionals Laboratory professionals, including chemists, microbiologists, laboratory technicians, and supervisors, play a critical role in supporting the mission of DPH.
At DPH, laboratory professionals work in the State Public Health Laboratory or one of the four Public Health Hospitals, and make important contributions to public health in the Commonwealth by processing laboratory tests (including for COVID-19), maintaining a high level of quality in testing procedures, and having an overall positive impact on patient care. Want to learn more? Check out the profiles below! Shevonne Taylor, Laboratory Technician, State Public Health Laboratory
Shevonne has worked at the State Public Health Lab since April 2019. She has discovered that she has joined a health profession that is highly respected and constantly evolving. She finds working at DPH keeps her mind stimulated and the job challenges ensure that she is constantly able to find motivat
At 7 o’clock on a weekday morning the Reverend Manuel W. Aran logs into a computer in the small chaplaincy office at Falmouth Hospital as the corridors around him begin
John Stote, convicted in murder of Springfield restaurant owner John ‘Jackie’ Regan, gets rare medical parole after contracting COVID in prison
Updated Jan 30, 2021;
Posted Jan 30, 2021
John E. Stote talks with his attorney during a hearing Hampden Superior Court in Springfield in June 1997.The Republican file
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A free man in a hospital bed on a ventilator, after contracting COVID-19 in state prison.
A former used car salesman, cocaine dealer and fraudster, Stote was in 1997 convicted of the brutal murder of John “Jackie” Regan, a restaurant owner who got in a dispute with Stote over the sale of a bar. By his own admission, Stote stabbed Regan many times, then wrapped him in a set of green sheets. He weighted Regan’s body with dumbbells and dumped it in the Connecticut River on his way to a wedding on Cape Cod. Regan remained missing for months until two canoeists found his body in a marshy area near South Windsor.
An inmate walks down a hallway inside the Worcester County jail. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Tracking deaths in Massachusetts jails and prisons has long been difficult, with details of fatalities kept secret from the public, and often from family members, too.
Last year, the federal government changed the way it counts deaths in custody a move that’s received little notice in a chaotic period marked by a global pandemic and political unrest. The new method has done little to improve transparency for the public. I have just been disgusted, said U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who sponsored the Death in Custody Reporting Act in 2000. You can t get the administration to move to even count the deaths.