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ST. LOUIS • A former resident at St. Louis University Hospital wrote fraudulent prescriptions to obtain pain pills and other drugs for himself and others, a federal indictment claims.
That former resident, Kyle Betts, was indicted last week on three felony charges of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud or forgery.
Betts’ lawyer, Scott Rosenblum, said Wednesday that Betts had just been informed about the indictment. Rosenblum said that Betts would be returning to St. Louis to appear in court, and would plead not guilty to the charges.
The indictment says that Betts, who lived in Lincoln County at the time, “wrote and signed over seventy prescriptions for controlled substances using a local hospital’s Drug Enforcement Administration registration numbers” from July 2015 to January 2016.
It says Betts used the names of six relatives and romantic partners on the prescriptions, to avoid detection, but picked up the pills himself. In all, Betts’ fraud yielded 1,366 “dosage units,” the indictment says.
A St. Louis University spokeswoman declined to comment.
According to April 2014 newsletter from the SLU medical school’s Department of Neurology & Psychiatry, Betts completed medical school at the Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Iowa Newsletter in May of 2014.
A LinkedIn profile says that he graduated from Truman State university in 2010 and is now an assistant professor at the Western University of Health Sciences in Lebanon, Oregon. A university spokesman said he was hired Feb. 1.