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MARATHON, Fla. – A 38-year-old Big Pine Key man was arrested Sunday after the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said he stole medication from the emergency room at Fishermen’s Hospital in Marathon.
A nurse at the hospital noticed someone had broken a security seal on a crash cart and stolen a large amount of medication just before 3 p.m.
When Deputy Vincent Torres arrived at the hospital, the nurse told him that she suspected it was a previous patient named Christopher Frazier.
Frazier was in the emergency room earlier that day.
As he was being discharged, the nurse noticed a large amount of medication in Frazier’s personal bag that wasn’t prescribed to him, deputies said.
The nurse asked Frazier if the bag was his, deputies said, and he denied that it was. He then left the hospital in a hurry.
He left the bag behind in the process.
The cart with the broken security seal was the one that was beside Frazier’s hospital bed, deputies said, and the medications in the bag did come from inside the cart.
Other medication was missing and not found in the property bag.
By 5:30 p.m., Sgt. Evan Calhoun was on patrol on Big Pine Key when he got a call about a trespasser on Avenue B. He found Frazier and spoke to him. He also noticed Frazier walk over to a recycling bin on the side of the road and discard something, deputies said.
Calhoun patted Frazier down after seeing a bulge in one of his pockets that could have been a weapon, deputies said. But instead of a weapon, he found a syringe of lidocaine in one pocket and a vial of epinephrine in another pocket.
After learning of the incident at the hospital, Calhoun then went to the recycling bin and found five more vials of various medications.
All of the medications were from the crash cart at Fishermen’s Hospital.
Frazier was arrested on charges of grand theft and tampering with evidence.
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