Incident 33706

Marisha Winiarczyk, an Erie woman was sentenced to serve work release Friday for illegally writing prescriptions while working on a forged nursing license at an assisted living facility.

The woman received two months of work release and four months on electronic monitoring, followed by three and a half years of probation, from Erie County Judge Daniel Brabender.

She pled guilty in October to a felony count of acquiring controlled substances by misrepresentation and a second-degree misdemeanor count of impersonating a holder of an occupational license. Dozens of other charges, including criminal use of a communication facility and identity theft, were dropped as part of her plea agreement with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

State investigators charged that Winiarczyk forged and illegally filled prescriptions for opioid and anxiety medications, including oxycodone, during years when she worked as a registered nurse at the Regency at South Shore.

Agents also accused Winiarczyk of working as a nurse without a license and providing a forged nursing license to the Regency at South Shore in Erie in 2009.

Winiarczyk admitted during a January 2017 interview that she was not a licensed registered nurse in Pennsylvania, according to the affidavit of probable cause.

Officials at LECOM Health, which owns the Regency at South Shore, previously said in a statement that no residents were harmed as a result of Winiarczyk’s conduct and that the Regency had taken steps to prevent a similar situation from occurring in the future.

LECOM also said that Winiarczyk was a “longtime and trusted employee” of the Regency before it was purchased by LECOM in 2015.

State agents said the investigation started after the office manager at a medical practice reported that some prescriptions were faxed from the Regency at South Shore to Frontier Pharmacy in Erie. The prescriptions were for a patient at the facility and were submitted as being authorized by a doctor, but the doctor was not treating the patient and had not authorized the prescriptions, according to the affidavit.