A Rowland Heights doctor, who was the first physician in the country convicted of murder by overprescribing drugs, was sentenced Friday to 30 years in state prison for killing three patients.
Advertisement
“(She’s) a person who seemingly did not care about the lives of her patients in this case but rather appeared more concerned about distributing unsafe controlled substances in an assembly line fashion so as to collect payments which amounted to her amassing several million dollars”, said George Lomeli, the Superior Court Judge that imposed Dr. Tseng’s sentence, according to Fox News.
“I’m really terribly sorry, ‘ she told the courtroom audience which was crowded with victims” relatives.
It sends a strong message to the medical community at large, the prosecutor said, that this is a real problem and it needs to be taken seriously. The defense sought a 15-years-to-life term.
“You froze time for all of us and the lives you so carelessly took”, she said. She’s not the first physician to be convicted for drug offenses, but she is the first physician to be charged with murder in connection with overdoses she did not personally administer.
The U.S.is in the midst of a prescription painkiller overdose epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. She operated a storefront medical clinic with her husband in the Los Angeles suburb of Rowland Heights.
Tseng’s mother who spoke to the LA Times, characterized her daughter as a caring individual who was simply fooled by her patients, fooled by the patients who came to her for help and in return received a fist-full of prescriptions. A jury convicted the 45-year-old guilty of second-degree murder in October for the deaths of 21-year-old Joey Rovero of San Ramon, 25-year-old Steven Ogle of Palm Desert and 29-year-old Vu Nguyen of Lake Forest.
Prosecutors said Dr. Tseng prescribed “massive quantities of addictive and unsafe drugs” to the men, though they had “no legitimate need” for the drugs, according to an October statement from the L.A. District Attorney’s Office.
She was not charged in the deaths of nine other patients because of other factors involved in those deaths, such as drugs prescribed by other doctors and a possible suicide.
Tseng’s case is in some ways emblematic of the role so-called dirty doctors play in creating and sustaining addicts, according to law enforcement officials interviewed by CNN. He believes the medical board, not prosecutors should be the ones to go after reckless doctors continuing to prescribe pills to patients they know abuse them. Rovero, Ogle and Nguyen, who Tseng knew were drug seekers, died between March and December of 2009.
“My heart is broken”, she said, declining to give reporters her name. She intends to appeal both the convictions and sentence.
Tseng pleaded not guilty.
Advertisement
Ogle’s mother, Desiree Ogle, said her son died eight hours after getting a methadone prescription from Tseng. Defense lawyer Tracy Green said patients testified they were legitimately in pain and later became dependent on the drugs, hiding their addictions by seeing other doctors and picking up prescriptions from different pharmacies.
