This post was originally published on this site
A former Cohasset High School secretary with a history of mishandling prescription narcotics has been accused of stealing a student’s medicine from a locked nurse’s locker and replacing it with an over-the-counter antihistamine.
M. M. Carney, 46, was arraigned Friday on charges of larceny from a building, larceny of property worth more than $250 and larceny of drugs. Judge Mark Coven released her on her promise to return to court Nov. 22.
Cohasset police and school officials began looking into Carney’s activities this past May after a student who takes Focalin, a stimulant used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, reported that the pills she was given were the wrong color, according to a police report filed in Quincy District Court. School officials determined that the pills in a bottle that the student’s mother had dropped off had been swapped with Claritin.
School officials told police that the mother had come to the school early on a Friday morning and given the medicine to Carney because the school nurse had not yet arrived. Carney then gave the medicine to the nurse, who locked it in a closet in the nurse’s office, police said.
Assistant High School principal Brian Scott told police he had recently learned that Carney knew where a spare key for the closet was hidden. He said he’d also reviewed video from the school’s surveillance cameras and discovered that Carney had let herself into the school over the weekend. He said she had no reason to be there without his knowledge.
Police say a Cohasset officer was discussing the investigation with school officials and Principal Carolyn Connolly at the school when Carney, who had left the school minutes earlier to get coffee, called and said she’d been in an accident and was waiting for a tow truck. Police determined that there had been no accidents in Cohasset or in neighboring Hingham and Hull.
Carney did not return to work that day and could not be reached until the principal, concerned about her safety, called her emergency contact. She did not return to work the following two work days and called the superintendent on the third day to resign.
Cohasset police said Carney had worked as a nurse before she was hired by the Cohasset schools but had voluntarily surrendered her nurse’s license after a series of problems involving the handling of narcotic drugs.
While working at Sunbridge of Weymouth in February 2003, Carney was found to have falsified prescribers’ verbal orders for Vicodin for a patient whose medication had been discontinued and to have administered Vicodin while off duty and before she had an order. Then when working at Crestview Healthcare in Quincy that November, she was found to have removed narcotics from a medicine supply without documentation showing she’d administered them.
Carney was also charged twice that year in Hingham District Court with uttering a false prescription. The disposition of those charges could not determined Monday.