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A Lakewood nurse pleaded guilty this week to criminal charges that accused her of stealing liquid pain medication from the nursing home where she worked.
Michelle Brown, 44, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to theft and drug possession, both felony counts. In exchange for her guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop a count of tampering with medication.
Brown faces a maximum sentence of 30 months at a Feb. 13 sentencing hearing before Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Cassandra Collier-Williams.
Prosecutors said Brown, a nurse at Crestmont North Nursing Home, stole liquid morphine and hydromorphone from bottles as they sat on medication carts in the nursing home hallway, poured some of the drugs into pill baggies and then put water back into the bottle to bring the liquid back up to the level it was before, prosecutors said.
Investigators could not determine how much of the medication Brown stole, or how diluted she left the medication, prosecutors said. None of the patients were hurt or complained about their medication.
Other employees at the home reviewed the facility’s surveillance video after they noticed Brown acting suspicious in March, and saw Brown ducking into closets, empty rooms and rooms of patients assigned to other nurses, prosecutors said.
They confronted Brown, who admitted to stealing medication twice, on March 1 and March 7, then taking it home and using it herself, prosecutors said.
“This defendant took advantage of her position as a nurse to illicitly obtain drugs and tried to conceal the evidence,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said in an emailed statement through a spokesman after her indictment. “In doing so, she placed innocent patients at risk by tampering with their medication. We will seek an appropriate punishment.”