A former nurse anesthetist from Cobb County was sentenced Friday to life plus 25 years for sexually assaulting and videotaping sedated female patients under his care, Channel 2 Action News reports.
Prosecutors called Paul Patrick Serdula a serial pervert, saying that he took lewd photographs of women after he had drugged them – sometimes during childbirth, sometime during dental surgical procedures – and assaulted female patients 11 times.
Not only that, they said, but he also secretly videotaped seven women in a bathroom in his Marietta home.
A psychologist testified that the 49-year-old Serdula may have suffered some sort of brain damage and was unable to control his actions.
But the most dramatic testimony was that of his victims.
“I was horrified,” one victim testified, her voice breaking. “How do you explain what that feels like? I mean, that’s your worst nightmare as a woman, to be sexually assaulted.”
Another victim told how she had to break the news to her teenage daughter what had happened to her, and that she had to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. A third said she now can’t bear the thought of having a family with her husband.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not identify the victims of sexual assault.
Superior Court Judge Reuben Green told Serdula as he sentenced him, “Certainly the fact you held a position of authority, that you held a position of trust and that you breached that trust, that’s a huge factor weighing against you.”
The defendant declined to say anything except some one-word answers to the judge, and he showed little emotion as he was sentenced.
Prosecutors said the defendant will not be eligible for parole for 55 years.
Serdula had been found guilty of 34 charges in a bench trial in April. Most of his 19 victims were unconscious at the time of the incidents, and several were younger than 16 years old.
Serdula was arrested Nov. 18, 2009, after a woman at a dentist office where he worked in Marietta found his cellphone affixed to the underside of the bathroom sink. The lens of the cellphone camera was trained upon the commode.
Police searched the phone and found multiple videos and images from the bathroom. They also found footage of Serdula touching and sexually assaulting unconscious women at Cobb Hospital, where he also worked.
Serdula, once a successful medical professional who leased a Corvette and a BMW and owned homes in Marietta and Panama City, Fla., saw his world crumble after his arrest. While he was in jail last year, his wife divorced him and he lost his nursing license.
-- Staff writer Andria Simmons contributed to this article.
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