Two of the fired employees were health care technicians charged with beating a male patient at the state psychiatric hospital in Goldsboro.

Taniko Dominique Upton, 33, was accused of hitting the patient in the abdomen, then hitting and punching the man in the head and side after he fell to the floor. Upton said he was wrongly accused.

William Kenneth Johnson, 52, was accused of holding the man during the initial assault, then joining in the beating once the victim was on the floor.

The part-time worker and the third full-time worker were nurses, said Tom Lawrence, a state Department of Health and Human Services spokesman. Lawrence, who could not provide the nurses' names, said that he was not certain of the reasons for the action against the nurses but that they might have been held at fault for not reporting what they knew about the beating.

The firings came a day after investigators arrived at Cherry for a review of hospital operations. Investigators are checking to see what changes have been made at the hospital after the discovery this month that a patient, Steven Sabock, died in April after sitting in a chair for 22 hours without food while hospital staff watched television and played cards nearby.

Dempsey Benton, head of the state agency that oversees the psychiatric hospitals, criticized hospital administrators for their lenient treatment of the 16 staff members found to bear some fault in Sabock's negligent treatment. One nurse resigned, but no one was fired.

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