From approximately February 28 to April 18, 2022, Dunton, a Florida licensed Registered Nurse (RN), worked at an outpatient surgical center in Jensen Beach, Martin County, Fla. as a circulating nurse. While working at the center, Dunton took vials of fentanyl, a narcotic painkiller in liquid form, and self-administered it by injection. To avoid detection, she replaced the fentanyl from nearly 450 vials with saline solution, and then returned the adulterated vials to the center for use during outpatient surgical procedures.

In May 2016, while working at Genesis Medical Center in Davenport, Pierce allegedly stole morphine from one patient by signing out 10 times the amount of the drug ordered by a doctor and keeping the excess.

Ten days later, she allegedly signed out 200 milligrams of fentanyl for a patient, administered 25 milligrams and retained the rest.

A week after that, she allegedly took 100 milligrams of fentanyl, gave 25 milligrams to the patient and kept the rest.

Originally charged with three counts of prohibited acts and one count of tampering with records, Pierce agreed to a plea deal that resulted in her conviction on a single count of prohibited acts. She was granted a deferred judgment that will result in the conviction being expunged from her record if she successfully completes her probation.

In 2014 and 2015, Pierce worked at two other hospitals and a care facility where, according to the Iowa Board of Nursing, she allegedly misappropriated patient medications.

In March 2016, she agreed to have her license placed on probation for one year.

Pierce worked for Genesis from November 2015 to June 2016. Nine days after she was hired by the hospital, and six months before the alleged thefts that occurred there, Pierce was criminally charged with theft and prohibited acts stemming from her conduct as a nurse at the Vista Woods nursing home in Ottumwa.

In that case, prosecutors say that in August 2015, Pierce stole a vial of morphine from an emergency kit at Vista Woods.

She initially was charged with theft and prohibited acts but later agreed to a plea deal that resulted in a conviction on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, resulting in a sentence of two years’ unsupervised probation.

In June 2016, Pierce’s employment at Genesis ended and her license was placed on probation. In May 2017, Pierce surrendered her nursing license.

Moses, as a registered nurse with a Cedar Rapids hospital, diverted the opioids from Sept. 6 to Oct. 12, 2017, and used the drugs herself, according to the plea agreement. She used her own fingerprint and/or pass code to obtain the drugs from a dispensing machine.

She punctured vials of hydromorphone with needles to withdraw the drug and then refilled the vials with a saline solution to make them appear to be full, the plea stated.

In September 2017, within weeks of starting her job at the hospital — which isn’t identified in court documents and which prosecutors have declined to name — Moses obtained unauthorized access to the drug vials, the plea stated.

For example, on Sept. 26, 2017, after other employees discovered four vials had been tampered with, the pharmacy director and a technician replaced all the vials. But the next day, Moses had accessed medical records of patients that were not hers to obtain drugs ordered by doctors.

The following day, another inventory was conducted and they found the vials had been punctured to remove some of the drug and clear liquid had replaced it, according to the plea.

Hospital officials reviewed surveillance camera footage that showed Moses in the room where the vial dispensing machine was kept. She was scheduled to stay with the ambulance for her entire shift and had gone in early and not clocked in.

According to the plea, Moses on Sept. 27, 2017, also made false statements in connection with health care benefits and pharmacy records to cover up taking the drugs for her own use.

The hospital fired her Oct. 10, 2017, and reported the incident to the Iowa Board of Nursing. Reasons for termination included unsatisfactory work performance, failure to follow her nurse manager’s instructions, questionable use of accessing drug machine and “exhibiting signs that she was diverting hydromorphone.”

In Iowa Board of Nursing documents filed in April 2019, hospital officials said their investigation found Moses, on at least one occasion, was the only one to access the narcotic in question.

When her employer asked her to submit a urine sample for testing, Moses admitted to taking the narcotic not prescribed to her, according to the board documents.

The board included another incident in which Moses diverted narcotics while working at a different hospital, also not identified, from Sept. 10 through Nov. 22, 2018.

At that hospital, Moses was accused of removing medications from patients she wasn’t assigned, failing to account for those removed and failing to document pain assessments, the board stated.

In April 2019, the board indefinitely suspended Moses’ nursing license pending completion of recommended treatment.

Moses, who was issued her nursing license in 2006, voluntarily surrendered her license in May of last year, according to board documents.

She also was convicted in October 2020 in Linn County District Court for drunken driving.

In July of last year, a federal prosecutor asked the court to revoke Moses’ pretrial release because of probation violations, though a judge declined to do so.

Moses was to have additional substance abuse evaluation and increased drug testing and monitoring left up to the discretion of the U.S. Probation Office.

Moses also was indicted last July on a separate charge of theft of government funds.

She pleaded in November to falsely reporting her income to receive increased unemployment benefits from April through August of last year, according to court documents. Moses received at least $4,368 because of increased benefits during the pandemic.

No sentencing date is set on the theft charge at this time.

In the opioid case, Moses faces up to 10 years on the tampering charge and five years on the false statements. Sentencing will be set after a presentencing report is completed.

Moses, as a registered nurse with a Cedar Rapids hospital, diverted the opioids from Sept. 6 to Oct. 12, 2017, and used the drugs herself, according to the plea agreement. She used her own fingerprint and/or pass code to obtain the drugs from a dispensing machine.

She punctured vials of hydromorphone with needles to withdraw the drug and then refilled the vials with a saline solution to make them appear to be full, the plea stated.

In September 2017, within weeks of starting her job at the hospital — which isn’t identified in court documents and which prosecutors have declined to name — Moses obtained unauthorized access to the drug vials, the plea stated.

For example, on Sept. 26, 2017, after other employees discovered four vials had been tampered with, the pharmacy director and a technician replaced all the vials. But the next day, Moses had accessed medical records of patients that were not hers to obtain drugs ordered by doctors.

The following day, another inventory was conducted and they found the vials had been punctured to remove some of the drug and clear liquid had replaced it, according to the plea.

Hospital officials reviewed surveillance camera footage that showed Moses in the room where the vial dispensing machine was kept. She was scheduled to stay with the ambulance for her entire shift and had gone in early and not clocked in.

According to the plea, Moses on Sept. 27, 2017, also made false statements in connection with health care benefits and pharmacy records to cover up taking the drugs for her own use.

The hospital fired her Oct. 10, 2017, and reported the incident to the Iowa Board of Nursing. Reasons for termination included unsatisfactory work performance, failure to follow her nurse manager’s instructions, questionable use of accessing drug machine and “exhibiting signs that she was diverting hydromorphone.”

In Iowa Board of Nursing documents filed in April 2019, hospital officials said their investigation found Moses, on at least one occasion, was the only one to access the narcotic in question.

When her employer asked her to submit a urine sample for testing, Moses admitted to taking the narcotic not prescribed to her, according to the board documents.

The board included another incident in which Moses diverted narcotics while working at a different hospital, also not identified, from Sept. 10 through Nov. 22, 2018.

At that hospital, Moses was accused of removing medications from patients she wasn’t assigned, failing to account for those removed and failing to document pain assessments, the board stated.

In April 2019, the board indefinitely suspended Moses’ nursing license pending completion of recommended treatment.

Moses, who was issued her nursing license in 2006, voluntarily surrendered her license in May of last year, according to board documents.

She also was convicted in October 2020 in Linn County District Court for drunken driving.

In July of last year, a federal prosecutor asked the court to revoke Moses’ pretrial release because of probation violations, though a judge declined to do so.

Moses was to have additional substance abuse evaluation and increased drug testing and monitoring left up to the discretion of the U.S. Probation Office.

Moses also was indicted last July on a separate charge of theft of government funds.

She pleaded in November to falsely reporting her income to receive increased unemployment benefits from April through August of last year, according to court documents. Moses received at least $4,368 because of increased benefits during the pandemic.

No sentencing date is set on the theft charge at this time.

In the opioid case, Moses faces up to 10 years on the tampering charge and five years on the false statements. Sentencing will be set after a presentencing report is completed.

“She was a nurse at UnityPoint, was fired, then she’s up working again at Manchester, doing it all over again,” Vavricek said. “I’m not sure how that’s allowed in the state of Iowa … but she kept being a predator on these poor, elderly people who are dying and in pain.”

According to court records, Boll was fired from one Iowa hospital due to irregularities with narcotics handling, was quickly hired at a larger hospital where she was later suspended and then fired for narcotics handling, and then wound up working at a nursing home where she was fired for the same offense.

At all three health care institutions, Boll later admitted, she repeatedly stole drugs intended to ease the suffering of patients.

“She is a danger to the community,” Vavricek told the judge. “She — on at least 50 occasions — admits she stole hydrocodone from patients of a nursing home over a four-month period … And these elderly hospice patients died, and they died in pain at her hands.”

So how does a nurse fired for mishandling narcotics at one institution wind up working at another and then another?

An Iowa Capital Dispatch review of state and federal records shows that the safety net intended to protect patients from criminal caregivers is riddled with holes. Health facilities don’t share information about past employees’ misconduct; licensing boards don’t tell the public about criminal convictions of the professionals they oversee; and state inspectors don’t always sanction the facilities where the crimes are committed.

From October 2016 to August 2017, Boll worked at Manchester’s Regional Medical Center as a nurse. According to court records, she was fired from the hospital for a variety of issues, including inaccurate documentation of narcotics handling. Later, she admitted that while working at the hospital she regularly signed out medications, claiming to have given them to patients, but she was instead pocketing the drugs for her own use. She also admitted stealing injectable narcotics from hospice patients at the medical center.

Within three weeks of being fired from the Manchester hospital, Boll went to work as a nurse at Unity Point-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids. During her time there, she later admitted, she stole narcotic pain medication from hospice patients on numerous occasions. She was fired after an internal investigation found that she failed to follow the protocol for administering pain medications and failed to properly discard excess controlled substances. She had previously been suspended and warned about her failure to follow pain management protocols.

Almost immediately, Boll landed a job at the Good Neighbor nursing home in Manchester. She later admitted that on at least 50 occasions, she took hydrocodone prescribed for residents of the home. She said she stole the drugs by replacing them with over-the-counter pills such as Tylenol.

She also admitted that on Christmas Eve, 2018, she took the liquid morphine that was set up to provide 92-year-old Alice Bandy with pain relief. Using a syringe, she extracted the morphine from the bottle and then, to hide the theft, she replaced the pain killer with mouthwash.

“I knew my mom was in pain,” says Bandy’s daughter, Joyce Becker of Dundee. “So I kept asking the nurses, ‘Can you give her something for the pain?’ And they said, ‘She’s already on morphine.’ Well, then we later came to find out she wasn’t getting any of it. It was quite a shock. Mom really trusted everyone out there.”

Bandy died two weeks after the theft, on Jan. 8, 2019. She had chosen the Good Neighbor Home when she became ill because she had worked there for 16 years as a housekeeping supervisor and had faith in the quality of care at the home.

Boll also admitted stealing morphine from another resident of the home — a 98-year-old World War II veteran who spent 20 years of his retirement delivering Meals on Wheels for his elderly, Linn County neighbors.

During one shift, on Dec. 29, Boll went into the home’s pain-medication room and stole drugs belonging to 10 different patients, replacing them with over-the-counter medications. The patients or their insurers were billed at least $593 for the drugs they never received, according to court records.

In all, 14 residents of the Good Neighbor Home were harmed by Boll. The oldest was 101 years old, but most were in their 80s and 90s, and each was suffering either from significant end-of-life complications or had dementia.

Last July, federal prosecutors charged Boll with one count of tampering with a consumer product and 16 counts of acquiring controlled substances by misrepresentation, fraud, deception and subterfuge.

As part of a plea bargain with prosecutors, Boll agreed last summer to relinquish her nursing license and prosecutors dropped 15 of the 17 charges against her. She was sentenced to four years in prison.
Boll wasn’t criminally charged or subjected to any professional discipline until after her conduct at the Good Neighbor home was uncovered. So, prior to that, any background checks and calls to the state licensing board would have turned up nothing.

But had the Regional Medical Center or UnityPoint shared information about Boll’s job performance, she might never have had the opportunity to, in the prosecutor’s words, “prey” on the residents of the Good Neighbor home.

A spokeswoman for Regional Medical Center did not respond to several calls and emails from the Iowa Capital Dispatch, so it’s not clear what the hospital told UnityPoint and Good Neighbor.

However, both UnityPoint and Good Neighbor say they do not share with other employers negative information about past employees’ conduct.
When asked what prevents UnityPoint from sharing that sort of information with other medical providers, hospital spokeswoman Sarah Carizzo cited a self-imposed policy — one she described as “standard operating procedure” — that limits disclosure to a worker’s dates of employment, job title and full-time or part-time status.

Good Neighbor’s administrator, Matt Carpenter, said state law prohibits the home from telling other employers about past employees’ bad acts.

But Iowa law doesn’t bar that sort of disclosure. In fact, it encourages employers to share negative information about past employees by providing them with civil immunity. They can’t be sued for relaying negative information about past employees to prospective future employers, as long as the information is shared in good faith.

Iowa’s law, however, doesn’t take the additional step of requiring disclosure, which means employers face no repercussions for establishing policies that limit disclosure to dates of employment and job titles.
UnityPoint officials point out that Boll’s nursing license was in good standing when the hospital hired her. But that doesn’t always mean a licensee has an unblemished record.

Boll’s crimes at the Good Neighbor home involved at least 14 residents and more than 50 instances of theft. But the publicly available inspection reports for the home give no indication any of that ever happened. The reports make no mention of any thefts or tampering with medication.

On March 5, the Iowa Capital Dispatch asked Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals spokeswoman Stefanie Bond why that is. As of March 16, Bond still had no answer to the question.

It’s possible the inspections department was unaware of the thefts, or that it concluded the crimes didn’t entail any failings by the home itself with regard to quality of care or staff supervision.

The Good Neighbor home isn’t even mentioned in the Board of Nursing’s public statement of charges against Boll. The document says only that Boll was employed at “a long-term care facility” and that on “more than one occasion” she stole medication from more than one resident.

“She was a nurse at UnityPoint, was fired, then she’s up working again at Manchester, doing it all over again,” Vavricek said. “I’m not sure how that’s allowed in the state of Iowa … but she kept being a predator on these poor, elderly people who are dying and in pain.”

According to court records, Boll was fired from one Iowa hospital due to irregularities with narcotics handling, was quickly hired at a larger hospital where she was later suspended and then fired for narcotics handling, and then wound up working at a nursing home where she was fired for the same offense.

At all three health care institutions, Boll later admitted, she repeatedly stole drugs intended to ease the suffering of patients.

“She is a danger to the community,” Vavricek told the judge. “She — on at least 50 occasions — admits she stole hydrocodone from patients of a nursing home over a four-month period … And these elderly hospice patients died, and they died in pain at her hands.”

So how does a nurse fired for mishandling narcotics at one institution wind up working at another and then another?

An Iowa Capital Dispatch review of state and federal records shows that the safety net intended to protect patients from criminal caregivers is riddled with holes. Health facilities don’t share information about past employees’ misconduct; licensing boards don’t tell the public about criminal convictions of the professionals they oversee; and state inspectors don’t always sanction the facilities where the crimes are committed.

From October 2016 to August 2017, Boll worked at Manchester’s Regional Medical Center as a nurse. According to court records, she was fired from the hospital for a variety of issues, including inaccurate documentation of narcotics handling. Later, she admitted that while working at the hospital she regularly signed out medications, claiming to have given them to patients, but she was instead pocketing the drugs for her own use. She also admitted stealing injectable narcotics from hospice patients at the medical center.

Within three weeks of being fired from the Manchester hospital, Boll went to work as a nurse at Unity Point-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids. During her time there, she later admitted, she stole narcotic pain medication from hospice patients on numerous occasions. She was fired after an internal investigation found that she failed to follow the protocol for administering pain medications and failed to properly discard excess controlled substances. She had previously been suspended and warned about her failure to follow pain management protocols.

Almost immediately, Boll landed a job at the Good Neighbor nursing home in Manchester. She later admitted that on at least 50 occasions, she took hydrocodone prescribed for residents of the home. She said she stole the drugs by replacing them with over-the-counter pills such as Tylenol.

She also admitted that on Christmas Eve, 2018, she took the liquid morphine that was set up to provide 92-year-old Alice Bandy with pain relief. Using a syringe, she extracted the morphine from the bottle and then, to hide the theft, she replaced the pain killer with mouthwash.

“I knew my mom was in pain,” says Bandy’s daughter, Joyce Becker of Dundee. “So I kept asking the nurses, ‘Can you give her something for the pain?’ And they said, ‘She’s already on morphine.’ Well, then we later came to find out she wasn’t getting any of it. It was quite a shock. Mom really trusted everyone out there.”

Bandy died two weeks after the theft, on Jan. 8, 2019. She had chosen the Good Neighbor Home when she became ill because she had worked there for 16 years as a housekeeping supervisor and had faith in the quality of care at the home.

Boll also admitted stealing morphine from another resident of the home — a 98-year-old World War II veteran who spent 20 years of his retirement delivering Meals on Wheels for his elderly, Linn County neighbors.

During one shift, on Dec. 29, Boll went into the home’s pain-medication room and stole drugs belonging to 10 different patients, replacing them with over-the-counter medications. The patients or their insurers were billed at least $593 for the drugs they never received, according to court records.

In all, 14 residents of the Good Neighbor Home were harmed by Boll. The oldest was 101 years old, but most were in their 80s and 90s, and each was suffering either from significant end-of-life complications or had dementia.

Last July, federal prosecutors charged Boll with one count of tampering with a consumer product and 16 counts of acquiring controlled substances by misrepresentation, fraud, deception and subterfuge.

As part of a plea bargain with prosecutors, Boll agreed last summer to relinquish her nursing license and prosecutors dropped 15 of the 17 charges against her. She was sentenced to four years in prison.
Boll wasn’t criminally charged or subjected to any professional discipline until after her conduct at the Good Neighbor home was uncovered. So, prior to that, any background checks and calls to the state licensing board would have turned up nothing.

But had the Regional Medical Center or UnityPoint shared information about Boll’s job performance, she might never have had the opportunity to, in the prosecutor’s words, “prey” on the residents of the Good Neighbor home.

A spokeswoman for Regional Medical Center did not respond to several calls and emails from the Iowa Capital Dispatch, so it’s not clear what the hospital told UnityPoint and Good Neighbor.

However, both UnityPoint and Good Neighbor say they do not share with other employers negative information about past employees’ conduct.
When asked what prevents UnityPoint from sharing that sort of information with other medical providers, hospital spokeswoman Sarah Carizzo cited a self-imposed policy — one she described as “standard operating procedure” — that limits disclosure to a worker’s dates of employment, job title and full-time or part-time status.

Good Neighbor’s administrator, Matt Carpenter, said state law prohibits the home from telling other employers about past employees’ bad acts.

But Iowa law doesn’t bar that sort of disclosure. In fact, it encourages employers to share negative information about past employees by providing them with civil immunity. They can’t be sued for relaying negative information about past employees to prospective future employers, as long as the information is shared in good faith.

Iowa’s law, however, doesn’t take the additional step of requiring disclosure, which means employers face no repercussions for establishing policies that limit disclosure to dates of employment and job titles.
UnityPoint officials point out that Boll’s nursing license was in good standing when the hospital hired her. But that doesn’t always mean a licensee has an unblemished record.

Boll’s crimes at the Good Neighbor home involved at least 14 residents and more than 50 instances of theft. But the publicly available inspection reports for the home give no indication any of that ever happened. The reports make no mention of any thefts or tampering with medication.

On March 5, the Iowa Capital Dispatch asked Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals spokeswoman Stefanie Bond why that is. As of March 16, Bond still had no answer to the question.

It’s possible the inspections department was unaware of the thefts, or that it concluded the crimes didn’t entail any failings by the home itself with regard to quality of care or staff supervision.

The Good Neighbor home isn’t even mentioned in the Board of Nursing’s public statement of charges against Boll. The document says only that Boll was employed at “a long-term care facility” and that on “more than one occasion” she stole medication from more than one resident.

Akeya Lee Whitenight, 36, of Sunbury, was sentenced Friday after she pleaded guilty in Montour County Court to a charge of receiving stolen property.

She was charged in October 2020 by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office after it received a report from Geisinger’s diversion investigation team.

Numerous discrepancies were identified in a Geisinger audit of narcotics dispensing records and documentation related to Whitenight’s controlled substances activity, the arrest affidavit stated.

They included dispensing narcotics without a written order, failure to document the patient received the drug as ordered and administering drugs when patients were documented as being asleep or in surgery, the charges stated.

Drugs Whitenight is accused of diverting are oxycodone, fentanyl, hydromorphone, tramadol and pregabalin.

Kristie Ann Mollohan of Kalamazoo entered the pleas Thursday, Aug. 30, in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids. A third tampering charge will be dismissed.

The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison. She will be sentenced later.

She worked as a home-health nurse for a Wyoming company in 2016 when a 4-year-old boy in her care died of seizures after his medication was diluted, Allegan police said.

In a plea agreement, Mollohan acknowledged that she removed liquid diazepam, or Valium, intended for a disabled 30-year-old patient in Barry County as well as two brothers in Allegan County. Tests showed that bottles contained as little as 1 percent of the declared concentration.

All of the patients required around-the-clock care.

"The Defendant knew that she put the patients' lives at risk by diluting their diazepam given that the diazepam was used, among other purposes, to suppress seizures," according to a plea agreement Mollohan signed.

Ryley Maue, 4, died Aug. 26, 2016, at his Allegan home.

The state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs was notified on Sept. 13, 2016, that Mollohan, a licensed-practical nurse, was fired by Lakeshore Home Health Care Services for diverting drugs, according to state records obtained by MLive in a Freedom of Information request.

She admitted that she took Valium that was intended for the three patients, state records showed.

The state said the victim's seizure episodes were stable until Mollohan began diluting his liquid Valium. Mollohan was the only nurse treating the three patients to test positive for benzodiazepines.

Mollohan allegedly told a pediatric care coordinator at her company that she had diluted Valium with water. She said she took the drug herself because she was depressed about her husband leaving her and her sister's death years ago, records said.

Another LPN had reported that the Valium intended for the patients was clear, rather than its usual pale yellow.

Mollahan told investigators that she provided undiluted doses of Valium to the patients but acknowledged that other nurses, who also would provide medication, would not know that it had been diluted, reports said.

The state said that Mollohan had earlier been investigated for suspected drug diversion at another company but no charges resulted. She told investigators that her medical insurance would not cover the cost of a particular medication for depression while an approved drug was ineffective, records show.

Her nursing license was revoked last year.

After a months-long investigation, Brevard County Sheriff's Office investigators said this nurse would sign out twice as much fentanyl as the anesthesiologist needed and keep the excess for herself, according to Sheriff's Office reports.

Office staff at the surgery center soon noticed the discrepancy between how much the nurse was signing out and how much was actually being used during operations. Deputies were called Dec. 1 of last year after an audit was conducted.

The nurse was immediately suspended without pay when the investigation began.

The nurse was charged with grand theft of a controlled substance and has been released on bond, and declined to be interviewed by detectives.

In May 2016, while working at Genesis Medical Center in Davenport, Pierce allegedly stole morphine from one patient by signing out 10 times the amount of the drug ordered by a doctor and keeping the excess.

Ten days later, she allegedly signed out 200 milligrams of fentanyl for a patient, administered 25 milligrams and retained the rest.

A week after that, she allegedly took 100 milligrams of fentanyl, gave 25 milligrams to the patient and kept the rest.

Originally charged with three counts of prohibited acts and one count of tampering with records, Pierce agreed to a plea deal that resulted in her conviction on a single count of prohibited acts. She was granted a deferred judgment that will result in the conviction being expunged from her record if she successfully completes her probation.

In 2014 and 2015, Pierce worked at two other hospitals and a care facility where, according to the Iowa Board of Nursing, she allegedly misappropriated patient medications.

In March 2016, she agreed to have her license placed on probation for one year.

Pierce worked for Genesis from November 2015 to June 2016. Nine days after she was hired by the hospital, and six months before the alleged thefts that occurred there, Pierce was criminally charged with theft and prohibited acts stemming from her conduct as a nurse at the Vista Woods nursing home in Ottumwa.

In that case, prosecutors say that in August 2015, Pierce stole a vial of morphine from an emergency kit at Vista Woods.

She initially was charged with theft and prohibited acts but later agreed to a plea deal that resulted in a conviction on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, resulting in a sentence of two years’ unsupervised probation.

In June 2016, Pierce’s employment at Genesis ended and her license was placed on probation. In May 2017, Pierce surrendered her nursing license.