7 accused of hurting elderly or disabled, stealing medicine
By Deanna Boyd
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Posted on Thu, Feb. 19, 2004
FORT WORTH - Seven current and former employees of three Fort Worth nursing homes were arrested Wednesday, accused of injury to the elderly or disabled and stealing patients' prescribed medications.
Five of the women were arrested on warrants accusing them of injury to the elderly. Two face charges of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.
The nurses are accused of neglecting to treat Faye Sellers for severely infected pressure sores in her groin area.
"We know that a wound developed, and had it, in our opinion, been first noticed as it should have been and then treated, it never would have grown to the state that it did, which resulted in the serious injury," Brewer said.
Sellers, a 90-year-old stroke victim, died Dec. 18, 2001, from sepsis and pneumonia.
"...In the drug cases, Nancy Smothers Way, 52, and Sharron Fay Clark, 61, licensed vocational nurses at Southwest, are accused of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.
Affidavits accuse them of placing fraudulent telephone orders for hydrocodone.
"They marked that they gave
the medication, yet they never did," Brewer said. "They took it for themselves...."
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