DARLINGTON — A nurse who became addicted to painkillers after a lung transplant was convicted Jan. 10 of stealing hundreds of opioid prescription pills from her patients at Lafayette Manor.
Lindsey L. Wendling, 29, Manchester, Iowa, pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor counts of theft and was sentenced to two years on probation.
Her conditions of probation include no drinking, no bars and no contact with Lafayette Manor. She’s ordered to submit to any drug testing based on probable cause and undergo an assessment for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse treatment. She owes $1,389 in court assessments.
Wendling also entered a two-year deferred prosecution agreement on nine felony counts of theft in the case. If she complies with the agreement, the felonies will be fully dismissed. She has no prior criminal history.
Wendling was employed at Lafayette Manor, the county-owned skilled nursing facility at 719 E. Catherine St. in Darlington. Her logs of patient prescriptions started to raise suspicions in 2018, and the facility reported the discrepancies to police last February.
Wendling previously faced 12 felony theft charges but three were dropped to misdemeanors after her attorney and the district attorney reached a plea agreement with a joint sentence recommendation.
Judge Duane Jorgenson accepted the sentence recommendation. He referred to opioid pain medications as both a “curse” and “blessing” and said Wendling’s addiction was a mitigating factor.
Wendling’s attorney, Shaun O’Connell, and District Attorney Jenna Gill gave similar statements at her sentencing, agreeing on many aspects of the case.
“Lindsey had a lung transplant two and a half years ago, and with that came many complications,” O’Connell said. She was prescribed a narcotic for pain after the surgery and became addicted.
At the Manor, “there’s no evidence that any patient was denied their medication,” he said. Instead, she was “checking (medications) out when a patient wasn’t requesting them.”
Gill said Wendling still has a nursing license and works in healthcare. She was barred from administering medications as a condition of her bond in the case, and Gill wants to see that restriction continue during her probation.
“I certainly don’t think it would be appropriate for her to administer medications,” Gill said.
According to the criminal complaint, a police investigation at Lafayette Manor found Wendling “checked out” pain management medications like oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine sulfate and codeine but failed to document whether she gave them to residents.
The medications were not part of her patients’ daily medicine routine, and only when Wendling was on duty were medications checked out to those patients.
Other nurses told police they had suspected for a while that Wendling was diverting pills for her own use. Of 441 medication check-outs conducted by Wendling and examined during the investigation, nearly two-thirds, or 296, “were unaccounted for,” police found.
“All the meds were Schedule II Opioids, which are highly addictive pain control meds vulnerable to abuse,” an officer wrote in a report included with the criminal complaint.