A 40-year-old woman from Colona, Illinois was sentenced in May 2025 in federal court in Des Moines for diverting prescription drugs from nursing and senior living facilities where she had been employed as an administrator. The case was brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Iowa.
According to public court documents summarized by the HHS Office of Inspector General, she obtained prescription pills from at least five healthcare facilities between at least September 2021 and November 2022. The drugs included fentanyl patches, hydrocodone, morphine and oxycodone, which she took from the facilities' narcotics emergency kits and from locked medication carts and rooms.
The court imposed a three-year term of probation. She was also ordered to pay $1,975.61 in restitution, a $5,000 fine and a $200 special assessment.
The case highlights that administrators, not only clinical staff, may have access to emergency narcotics supplies and locked medication storage, and that diversion across multiple facilities can persist for more than a year before it is addressed. The summary does not describe how the diversion was detected or which state the facilities were in.