Former ER nurse gets one year for medication thefts

Jul. 2—BEVERLY — A former registered nurse who pleaded guilty earlier this year to tampering with pre-filled syringes of pain medication while working at Beverly Hospital was sentenced Tuesday to a year in prison.

That's a fraction of the amount of time federal prosecutors sought for Mark Croft, 48, of West Boylston. They had been recommending a 42-month sentence for him.

"Mark Croft was entrusted with the care of patients who found themselves in the Emergency Department and in need of pain medication," assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Callahan wrote in a sentencing memorandum. "Instead of using his skill and training to help these patients, Croft betrayed the trust placed in him and used his inside knowledge of the hospital's secure Pyxis machine — the hospital's automated medication dispensing machine — to steal pain medication to feed his own addiction."

Syrie Fried, Croft's lawyer, suggested in her own sentencing memorandum that the request was disproportionately harsh compared with sentences imposed against nurses in other parts of the country for the same conduct. She said she believes Massachusetts has charged a disproportionate share of nurses with tampering with medication, noting that six of the 46 prosecutions brought in federal courts around the country were in Massachusetts.

Even so, she acknowledged, "Common sense tells one that there have surely been many more than 46 such incidents that were discovered over this time period."

The under-reporting of medication diversions at hospitals was the subject of a Salem News series of reports in 2019, following revelations that a former Beverly Hospital pharmacy technician had taken approximately 18,000 pills from Pyxis machines at the hospital and satellite locations. She later received a suspended 2 1/2 year jail term and three years of probation.

Croft's conduct goes back further, to the winter of 2015 and 2016, when he was hired to work at the hospital even as he was facing an investigation into similar conduct at three other hospitals, which led to him signing a voluntary agreement not to practice. Croft did not disclose that agreement to Beverly Hospital administrators, however.

The charging documents cite two instances in which Croft used the information of two patients in January 2016, to withdraw opiates, in one case the generic version of Dilaudid and in the other, generic Demerol, from the Pyxis cabinet. Croft admitted using a needle to take some of the medication from their pre-filled syringes (called carpujects), then replacing the missing medication with saline.

But in its sentencing memorandum, the prosecution said there were at least 18 instances documented in which Croft accessed the medicine cabinet and then entered "cancel" or "return," — and said there's no way to know with certainty whether other patients were affected.

"Here, the Government here does not have direct evidence, in the form of victim impact statements or medical records, that conclusively shows that patients ... received medication from the tampered-with carpujects," Callahan wrote. "One reason for this lack of direct evidence is that the carpujects Croft admitted to tampering with are — by design — single-use devices that are discarded after a nurse uses them on a patient." Because of that, the hospital could not examine or analyze the contents.

And Croft acknowledged in an interview with investigators in 2016 he was "sure" that some patients did not receive adequate dosages of medication.

That, prosecutors argued, could have had lethal consequences, for instance if a doctor upped a dosage in the mistaken belief that a patient had a higher tolerance.

Croft's lawyer, meanwhile, said her client has spent the past five years dealing with his addiction.

Fried wrote that it was "particularly cruel that his punishment will be inflicted after such a long interval from the time of his crimes."

Croft is married and a father, and "His wife and children are still trying to come to grips with the near-certainty that he will be taken from them for a time," Fried wrote. "Mr. Croft has spent the last five years reforming himself, contemplating his misconduct, and awaiting with dread the inevitable consequences."

She also noted that Croft had tried to enroll in a court-sanctioned diversion program for people with addiction, but was turned down.

Under the sentence imposed Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs, Croft was sentenced to a year and a day to federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, the first year of which must be spent confined to his home.

Courts reporter Julie Manganis can be reached at 978-338-2521, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @SNJulieManganis.