Bail denied for surgery technician in hepatitis C scare

DENVER (AP) — A judge denied bail Thursday for a surgery technician accused of swapping out her dirty syringes for ones filled with a painkiller meant for patients — even though she knew she had hepatitis C.

Officials say Kristen Diane Parker, 26, may have exposed 6,000 people to the blood-borne liver disease. She’s accused of stealing syringes filled with Fentanyl from operating carts and swapping them with dirty ones filled with saline solution. Ten cases of hepatitis C have been linked to one of the centers where Parker worked.

Fentanyl is a narcotic painkiller 80 to 100 time stronger than morphine.

At the hearing Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jaime Pena played a June 30 videotaped interview with a Denver police detective in which Parker said hospital officials never made it clear she was hepatitis C positive, only that she should follow up with her doctor. She had taken a blood test before starting her job in October and tested positive for hepatitis C.

She said she didn’t follow up because she didn’t have symptoms, didn’t have health insurance or money for a doctor and she got distracted with her new job.

“I didn’t know that this was going to happen to the extent of people getting sick; that’s something that I can’t give back,” a tearful Parker told the detective.

But U.S. Magistrate Judge Craig B. Shaffer said the results of her blood tests were clear.

“Short of shooting a flare in the sky, I don’t know what more they could do,” Shaffer said of the hospital’s notifying Parker of her blood test.

He said her failure to follow up, and then her swapping dirty needles knowing they would be used on patients, made her a danger to the community.

Hundreds of worried patients of the two Colorado health centers where Parker worked took advantage of free blood tests to find out if they’d been infected.

“If it’s positive, that person [Parker] killed me,” patient Pat Criscito, 57, told The Denver Post before learning her negative test results Wednesday. “It’s murder, as far as I’m concerned.”

Parker, her hair tightly braided and in a black and gray-striped jail uniform, placed her face in her hands and cried at various times throughout the two-hour hearing Thursday. Her father, William Carl Parker, and two other family members sat in court.

Parker faces federal charges of tampering with a consumer product, creating a counterfeit controlled substance, and obtaining a controlled substance by deception or subterfuge.