BOSTON (AP) - A former nurse at a veterans’ hospital in Massachusetts has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for stealing morphine intended for dying veterans and using it herself, federal prosecutors say.
Kathleen Noftle, 55, of Tewksbury, was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Boston to three years and four months behind bars followed by three years of probation, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston.
Noftle used her position as a nurse in the hospice unit at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center campus in Bedford to obtain morphine that was meant for veterans under her care, authorities said.
Noftle in January 2017 mixed tap water from the sink with a portion of the liquid morphine doses, and then administered the diluted medication to her patients orally, prosecutors said. Noftle then took some of the remaining diluted solution herself, authorities said.
She pleaded guilty in October to tampering with a consumer product and obtaining a controlled substance by misrepresentation, fraud, deception and subterfuge.
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