Ex-doctor’s aide admits selling prescriptions

A former office manager for a local physician has admitted that she sold blank, signed prescriptions over a nearly two-year period to someone who used them fraudulently to purchase more than 13,000 oxycodone pills.

Juliann Ignacio pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Wednesday to conspiring to distribute and possess with intent to distribute oxycodone. She faces a maximum 20-year prison term at sentencing in March.

Ignacio, 51, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Kenneth J. Mansfield that she sold the prescriptions to co-defendant Thomas Vasconcellos.

“He was a patient before. I knew he was in pain,” Ignacio said.

She also said she did it “to support my drug addiction.”

Ignacio has state drug and drug paraphernalia convictions from 2005. Her lawyer, Neal Kugiya, told Mansfield that Ignacio is in a residential substance abuse treatment program.

Kugiya said Ignacio did not receive any oxycodone from Vasconcellos.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tony Roberts told Mansfield that when pharmacists suspicious of the prescriptions called the doctor’s office, Ignacio falsely verified that they were legitimate. He also said that toward the end of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s investigation, Ignacio sold prescriptions to undercover agents.

Roberts said that between October 2014 and last May, Vasconcellos used 80 of the blank prescription forms he bought from Ignacio to obtain 13,316 oxycodone pills. He said the pills were 15 to 30 milligrams each.

At a court hearing in August, Vasconcellos’ lawyer said Vasconcellos is addicted to oxycodone, stemming from his arthritis pain.

Roberts said Vasconcellos didn’t just use the oxycodone for himself, but also distributed some of it to others.

Two other defendants, Louis Lei Mamo Imbleau and Liza Wailana Roberts, are facing federal charges of conspiring to distribute and possess with intent to distribute oxycodone, morphine and hydromorphone in what the government says is a separate but related case.

Vasconcellos, Imbleau and Roberts are scheduled to stand trial in February.