Police in Medford, Oregon, said Thursday that a former nurse in an intensive care unit had been arrested on charges of switching patients’ pain medications for tap water.
The Medford Police Department said in a statement that Dani Mari Schofield is being charged with 44 counts of assault in the second degree. These charges “reflect the total amount of patients that this investigation revealed to have been affected by Schofield’s criminal actions.”
One is charged with assault in the second degree when they “intentionally or knowingly causes serious physical injury to another,” the statement said.
The arrest happened almost seven months after the 378-bed Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford called the police to report a rise in the number of central line infections in patients. Central lines are tubes that are put into big veins to give medicine.
A police statement released Thursday said there were concerns that Schofield had been taking patients’ liquid fentanyl for her own use and then replacing it with tap water, which could have caused major infections.
Police did not say how many of the victims Schofield was accused of neglecting had died. Horace Wilson was an Asante patient who died after being taken to the hospital with a cut spleen and broken ribs after falling off a ladder in January 2022. In March, a lawsuit was made on his behalf.
The case said that Wilson’s painkillers were switched out for dirty tap water while he was in the hospital, which caused bacteria to get into his bloodstream and kill him.
Both Asante and Schofield were named as defendants in the case and were accused of being careless. At the time, neither of them replied to calls for comment.
NBC station KOBI-TV in Medford was the first to report the drug diversion charges in December 2023. Drug diversion means taking prescription drugs without a prescription, sometimes abusing them, or selling them illegally. The station said that at least one patient at Asante had died because their pain medicine was taken by someone else.
Police say Schofield left Asante in July 2023, but his lawyer did not answer a message right away asking for comment.
Schofield decided to have her nursing license taken away in November 2023, “pending completion of an investigation,” according to records from the Oregon State Board of Nursing.
President and CEO Tom Gessel thanked police for their “tireless work since our team brought concerns to them” in an internal memo sent to Asante workers Thursday after Schofield’s arrest was made public.
“We are greatly appreciative of the countless hours their investigators have spent on this complex matter,” he said.
