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For Dani Marie Schofield’s alleged victims — or the loved ones they left behind — last week’s arrest and arraignment of the former Asante nurse accused of stealing patients’ IV-administered pain medication and swapping in unsterilized tap water brought a measure of relief.

She has pleaded not guilty to 44 counts of second-degree assault — each count attached to a different alleged victim — and, earlier this year, proclaimed her innocence to The Lund Report.

Klamath Falls resident Diane Rogers, whose husband, Barry Samsten, is one of the 44 alleged victims named in Schofield’s indictment, told Rogue Valley Times reporter Buffy Pollock on Friday: “All this time it’s just been going through my mind: ‘How can she still be free?’ I’m in a better place in my mind, now that she’s at least behind bars. I just hope she doesn’t get out while she waits for trial. She shouldn’t be free.”

Last week’s events only closed out one chapter in this disturbing story.

As Schofield’s court proceedings get underway, the public will learn more about the alleged crimes that amount to what Jackson County Chief Deputy District Attorney Patrick Green, the lead prosecutor, said could go down as the “biggest case” ever handled by the county DA’s office.

What the community deserves to know, above all else, is how her alleged crimes could have happened in the first place. What hospital safeguards failed, week after month, for at least a year, as Schofield allegedly harmed one patient, then another, then dozens more?

What we may never learn is the total number of victims.

The indictment starts the clock of alleged criminality in July 2022 and stops it in July 2023, when Schofield left the hospital.

But Schofield’s name became public through a civil lawsuit, filed in February by Idiart Law Group in Central Point, related to the Feb. 25, 2022, death of Horace “Buddy” Wilson, a 65-year-old father of six and founder of a Jacksonville cannabis business. The suit claims the nurse did to Wilson what she’s alleged to have done to others: switch out the fentanyl in his IV bag with non-sterile tap water.

In addition to Wilson’s case, attorney Justin Idiart told the Times that his firm is working on others involving alleged victims who aren’t named in the indictment, including cases that predate the one-year timeframe.

Attorney Shayla Steyart, of Medford firm Shlesinger & deVilleneuve, told the Times, “I question if more cases were presented to the grand jury, and maybe only 44 were strong enough.” She added: “I still think that there likely were a lot more people affected by her.”

Her firm has said it will file just under 30 lawsuits against Asante.

Sixteen of the 44 named victims have died, yet prosecutors chose not to bring murder or manslaughter charges. It would have been too difficult to prove that Schofield caused or contributed to the demise of already-vulnerable ICU patients, and too easy for jurors to reasonably doubt that the nurse’s specific actions killed them.

But if the allegations are true, Schofield, at the very least, must have known that she was hurting patients. She must have known that not only was she depriving them of medication that would have eased their pain, she was likely making their pain worse, probably unbearable, while risking their death or permanent injury.

As Pollock reported, Rogers “has nightmares about the level of pain she imagines her husband experienced when his medication was allegedly stolen, and infection raged through his body.”

Rogers said: “I see Barry’s face, every day of my life, with his eyes looking at me like he was in so much pain.”