Prison bars with keys
By Patti Weaver
(Stillwater, Okla.) — A former employee of the Brookdale Nursing Home in Stillwater has been given a five-year prison term for stealing a terminally ill cancer patient’s morphine on two occasions and delivering it to a confidential informant for the Stillwater Police Department on the day that the patient died.
Danelle Lynne Lee, 41, who moved from Stillwater to Topeka, Kansas after being charged, was also given a concurrent five-year prison term last week by Associate District Judge Stephen Kistler for caretaker abuse by not administering the patient’s morphine.
The day after her arrest on May 28, 2019, in a truck at a Stillwater apartment complex for delivering two syringes of about .25 mg each of morphine to a police informant, Lee agreed to talk to Stillwater Police Detectives Josh Carson and Tom Comstock in the city jail, an affidavit said.
While employed by Brookdale Nursing Home, Lee said, “This past weekend (on May 24 and 25 of 2019), she was supposed to administer the morphine to a patient but became busy and forgot so she kept the morphine. She was trying to sell the morphine to make some extra money,” the affidavit said.
On May 31, 2019, Detective Comstock went to the nursing home to speak to two employees, who confirmed that the victim was a patient at the time of the theft, but died on May 28, 2019, the affidavit said. The patient “had been on hospice for terminal cancer and the morphine was being used to keep her comfortable,” the affidavit said.
On June 5, 2019, the detective talked to the patient’s primary care physician, who said the morphine was being given “to help alleviate pain as she was in the advanced stages of cancer and in hospice,” the affidavit said.
Asked if the patient’s missing at least two doses of morphine contributed to her death, the doctor said, “he did not believe missing two doses would contribute to her passing away,” but would have caused her to feel pain and discomfort, the affidavit said.
