Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
District of Massachusetts 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, May 8, 2023

BOSTON – A former nurse was sentenced today in federal court in Boston for diverting opioids from two Boston-area hospitals.

Lisa Tarr, 33, of St. Petersburg, Fla., was sentenced by U.S. Senior District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock to five years of probation, with the first year spent in home detention. In October 2022, Tarr pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawfully obtaining controlled substances by fraud, deception and subterfuge. 

In August 2018, Tarr was a Student Nurse working at a Boston-area hospital. Tarr admitted to investigators at the hospital that she had stolen and self-injected fentanyl, a Schedule II controlled substance, from the hospital. 

In 2020, while working for another Boston-area hospital, Tarr stole an infusion bag containing fentanyl that was being used to treat a patient. On another occasion in 2020, while still working at the second hospital, Tarr stole multiple syringes of hydromorphone, a Schedule II controlled substance, from a locked drug cabinet.

United States Attorney Rachael S. Rollins; Fernando McMillan, Special Agent in Charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Office of Criminal Investigations, New York Field Office; and Robert H. Goldstein, MD, PhD, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health made the announcement. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Begg Lawrence, Chief of Rollins’ Health Care Fraud Unit, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Evan Panich of Rollins’ Narcotics & Money Laundering Unit prosecuted the case.

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Topic
PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Component
USAO - Massachusetts