Lisa Tseng during her arraignment in court in Los Angeles in 2012. (Nick Ut/AP)
Joey Rovero was just five months from graduation. It was December of 2009 and the healthy, handsome, athletic Arizona State University senior had finished his second-to-last semester. It was time to blow off some steam.
So Rovero and his ASU frat buddies took a road trip: 360 miles due west. Their destination wasn’t the beach or a chic Hollywood club or even a campground in the countryside.
It was a doctor’s office.
From a small practice inside an orange strip mall, Dr. Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng allegedly had earned a reputation for hastily doling out powerful drugs. And true to that reputation, she allegedly quickly prescribed Rovero more than 200 pills, including nearly a hundred 30-milligram doses of Roxycodone, a potent and addictive painkiller.
Rovero and his friends filled their prescriptions and drove back to Tempe, their car practically rattling with pills.
Nine days later, Rovero was dead: the victim of a lethal mix of alcohol and the pills Tseng had prescribed him.
Normally, Rovero would have become a grim statistic: one of the roughly 100 Americans who die each day from a drug overdose. But Rovero’s case is different.
That’s because his doctor has been charged with his murder.
On Monday, Tseng went on trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court for the alleged murder of Rovero and two other young men: all patients who came to her looking for painkillers and died from an overdose shortly after. She has pleaded not guilty.
It’s a high stakes case that has drawn national scrutiny and stirred a thorny debate over medical ethics. Tseng’s attorneys say it wasn’t her fault that patients abused their prescriptions. Some medical experts, meanwhile, have warned that a guilty verdict could have a chilling effect as good doctors shy away from prescribing needy people medications.
But for families like Rovero’s, Tseng’s trial is a rare chance to hold accountable the doctors enabling the addiction of thousands of Americans, and perhaps to put a dent in the scourge.
“It was basically a pill mill operation — nothing more than legalized drug dealing, when it comes down to it,” Joey Rovero’s mother, April, told The Washington Post on Monday night.
“What our family has been through, losing our beautiful son, has been devastating,” she said. “But we are just one family of many. And there are other dirty doctors out there, over-prescribing and causing damage in catastrophic ways.”
On Monday, Deputy District Attorney John Niedermann showed jurors a series of powerful photos: dead bodies of Tseng’s patients next to the prescriptions she signed for them.
“He overdosed and died,” Niedermann said, scrolling through photo after photo, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The prosecutor told jurors that Tseng had been notified of her first patient’s death by overdose in September 2007, just two days after handing him prescriptions for Oxycodone, Xanax and Soma, according to the Associated Press. The next overdose came six months later.
More than a dozen times, officials called Tseng to tell her a patient had overdosed, Niedermann said. One overdose occurred in the hallway of her clinic.
“The defendant was repeatedly notified by law enforcement that her patients were dying on her,” Niedermann told jurors, according to the AP. “The evidence will show that during this period of time, the defendant’s practice of prescribing did not change at all.”
According to prosecutors, Tseng routinely handed out prescriptions to patients in as little as three minutes, without a physical exam and despite evidence of addiction. The Drug Enforcement Administration says she wrote more than 27,000 prescriptions in just three years, at an average of 25 a day. Once, when Tseng’s receptionist told her that the waiting room was overflowing with anxious patients, the doctor replied: “They’re druggies, they can wait,” Niedermann said.
Tseng has pleaded not guilty to three counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Rovero, 21; Vu Nguyen, 28; and Steven Ogle, 25. She is also facing several other felony counts of prescribing drugs to people not in need of medication. If convicted, she faces life in prison.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...r-string-of-patients-overdose-on-painkillers/
Joey Rovero was just five months from graduation. It was December of 2009 and the healthy, handsome, athletic Arizona State University senior had finished his second-to-last semester. It was time to blow off some steam.
So Rovero and his ASU frat buddies took a road trip: 360 miles due west. Their destination wasn’t the beach or a chic Hollywood club or even a campground in the countryside.
It was a doctor’s office.
From a small practice inside an orange strip mall, Dr. Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng allegedly had earned a reputation for hastily doling out powerful drugs. And true to that reputation, she allegedly quickly prescribed Rovero more than 200 pills, including nearly a hundred 30-milligram doses of Roxycodone, a potent and addictive painkiller.
Rovero and his friends filled their prescriptions and drove back to Tempe, their car practically rattling with pills.
Nine days later, Rovero was dead: the victim of a lethal mix of alcohol and the pills Tseng had prescribed him.
Normally, Rovero would have become a grim statistic: one of the roughly 100 Americans who die each day from a drug overdose. But Rovero’s case is different.
That’s because his doctor has been charged with his murder.
On Monday, Tseng went on trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court for the alleged murder of Rovero and two other young men: all patients who came to her looking for painkillers and died from an overdose shortly after. She has pleaded not guilty.
It’s a high stakes case that has drawn national scrutiny and stirred a thorny debate over medical ethics. Tseng’s attorneys say it wasn’t her fault that patients abused their prescriptions. Some medical experts, meanwhile, have warned that a guilty verdict could have a chilling effect as good doctors shy away from prescribing needy people medications.
But for families like Rovero’s, Tseng’s trial is a rare chance to hold accountable the doctors enabling the addiction of thousands of Americans, and perhaps to put a dent in the scourge.
“It was basically a pill mill operation — nothing more than legalized drug dealing, when it comes down to it,” Joey Rovero’s mother, April, told The Washington Post on Monday night.
“What our family has been through, losing our beautiful son, has been devastating,” she said. “But we are just one family of many. And there are other dirty doctors out there, over-prescribing and causing damage in catastrophic ways.”
On Monday, Deputy District Attorney John Niedermann showed jurors a series of powerful photos: dead bodies of Tseng’s patients next to the prescriptions she signed for them.
“He overdosed and died,” Niedermann said, scrolling through photo after photo, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The prosecutor told jurors that Tseng had been notified of her first patient’s death by overdose in September 2007, just two days after handing him prescriptions for Oxycodone, Xanax and Soma, according to the Associated Press. The next overdose came six months later.
More than a dozen times, officials called Tseng to tell her a patient had overdosed, Niedermann said. One overdose occurred in the hallway of her clinic.
“The defendant was repeatedly notified by law enforcement that her patients were dying on her,” Niedermann told jurors, according to the AP. “The evidence will show that during this period of time, the defendant’s practice of prescribing did not change at all.”
According to prosecutors, Tseng routinely handed out prescriptions to patients in as little as three minutes, without a physical exam and despite evidence of addiction. The Drug Enforcement Administration says she wrote more than 27,000 prescriptions in just three years, at an average of 25 a day. Once, when Tseng’s receptionist told her that the waiting room was overflowing with anxious patients, the doctor replied: “They’re druggies, they can wait,” Niedermann said.
Tseng has pleaded not guilty to three counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Rovero, 21; Vu Nguyen, 28; and Steven Ogle, 25. She is also facing several other felony counts of prescribing drugs to people not in need of medication. If convicted, she faces life in prison.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...r-string-of-patients-overdose-on-painkillers/
