Hospital Worker’s 5-Year Drug Theft Spree Potentially Endangered San Diego Patients
A surgical technician worked his way through hospitals on the West Coast, replacing sterile, narcotic-filled syringes with potentially unclean syringes containing a saline solution. So far, hospitals in or around San Diego, Seattle, Phoenix and Denver have asked 6,350 former patients to come in for blood tests to check for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
Los Angeles Times:
Fired Hospital Worker's Case Points To A Trail Of Stolen Drugs And Thousands Of Patients At Risk
When a surgical technician named Rocky Elbert Allen was accused in February of stealing drugs from a Denver-area hospital, it was the sort of news that ended up in a police blotter. But as investigators began combing through the 28-year-old former Navy operating-room tech’s past, they say, what emerged was a startling, five-year trail of inside drug thefts at hospitals across the West, the story of a man who was fired repeatedly yet was somehow able to talk his way back into employment – and, authorities say, more drugs. (Anderson, 5/29)