Caitlin Poytress, a former elementary school aide at Clover Hill Elementary School in Chesterfield, Virginia, will be spending five years in prison after getting busted stealing drugs from her students. According to reports, the 39-year-old is accused of stealing Adderall from students and replacing it with Benadryl.
Poytress was convicted of felony child neglect, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, petty larceny and possession of a controlled substance.
The school’s nurse initially noticed Poytress appeared to be tampering with the medications when pills were missing, bottles were out of place, and the medical logs had unexplained changes.
A parent of one of the students later alerted the nurse that her son’s pills were missing.
From the Daily Mail:
Later that month, a parent reported to police that her child’s Adderall pills were missing and had been replaced with Benadryl, leaving the boy groggy, dehydrated and ‘out-of-it.’ A school investigation found that an Adderall prescription for another student had been replaced with a sedative, and a prescription for a third child had been replaced with Aleve, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Poytress later admitted to investigators that she had been battling an ‘opium problem’ for five years.
It was also reported that Poytress was stealing medication while working at Henrico Doctors Hospital, according to the Virginia Board of Nursing. She allegedly “withdrew narcotic medication at a rate significantly higher than her co-workers, failed to administer or return this medication, and then documented its waste many hours after its initial withdrawal.”
She had tested positive for morphine and hydromorphone and later had her nursing license suspended.
