A nurse walked into work on a Tuesday morning and, police say, nearly didn’t walk out able to breathe right. On September 22, 2026, at roughly 10 a.m., a registered nurse in the Emergency Department at Auburn Community Hospital in Auburn, New York, was treating a patient when he allegedly turned on her — grabbing the stethoscope hanging from her neck with both hands and crossing it over her throat.
According to the Auburn Police Department, the patient, identified as Christopher B. Titus, applied enough pressure that the nurse had difficulty breathing. She managed to get her hands underneath the stethoscope, break the pressure, and free herself. Titus left the hospital before officers arrived. He was located and taken into custody the next day, September 23.
The charges
Titus was arraigned in Auburn City Court on three felonies: strangulation in the second degree, a Class D felony; attempted assault in the second degree, a Class E felony; and criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, a Class D felony — the stethoscope itself treated, under New York law, as the instrument used to choke her. He was remanded to the Cayuga County Jail. No plea has been reported publicly as of this writing.
Auburn Police did not release the nurse’s name, and The Nursing Directory is not naming her. She was treated and released; her current condition has not been reported. As with anyone charged but not yet tried, Titus is presumed innocent unless and until a court finds otherwise.
A tool meant for listening, turned into a weapon
Emergency departments are the single most dangerous unit in American nursing, and ligature-style attacks with whatever is already around a nurse’s neck — a badge lanyard, a stethoscope, a call-bell cord — show up often enough in incident reports that some hospitals now issue breakaway lanyards as standard PPE. A stethoscope worn the traditional way, draped and looped, puts two free ends within easy reach of anyone standing close enough to touch it.
Auburn Community Hospital, a roughly 90-bed community hospital serving Cayuga County, has not said publicly whether it will change equipment or screening policy after this incident. The Nursing Directory has not independently confirmed any hospital statement beyond the police department’s release.
I've worn a stethoscope around my neck on every shift for over a decade without once thinking about it as something someone could grab. That's exactly the problem. ED violence training spends a lot of time on verbal de-escalation and almost none on the fact that half of your own equipment — the lanyard, the stethoscope, the ID badge on a cord — is a ligature waiting for the wrong patient on the wrong day. If your department hasn't switched to breakaway lanyards, ask why not. It's a five-dollar fix for a problem that just put someone in Cayuga County Jail on a Class D felony.
Workplace violence against nurses is chronically undercounted — many hospitals still don’t have a standardized reporting pathway, and plenty of nurses don’t file a report for an incident that didn’t leave a visible mark. This one did, in the form of felony charges within 24 hours of the attack. That's the exception, not the rule, and it's worth asking why.