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CONCORD – A former pharmacy technician who previously pleaded guilty to charges accusing her of “unlawfully obtaining” and “tampering with” controlled substances while working at a retail pharmacy chain in Nashua has been sentenced to 15 months in federal prison.

U.S. Attorney for the District of New Hampshire Scott W. Murray said Kristina Coleman, 40, most recently of Hudson, had pleaded guilty in October to charges stemming from the investigation, which began in early 2019 after a pharmacy customer began noticing missing pills and other issues with her prescriptions.

Nashua police arrested Coleman in early November 2019, charging her with six offenses accusing her of stealing drugs and tampering with prescriptions.

The case moved to U.S. District Court in Concord in March 2020, and Coleman agreed to plead guilty to some of the charges about seven months later, setting the stage for her sentencing late last week.

According to Murray, the U.S. attorney, the timeline of events that led to Coleman’s arrest began in January 2019, when she agreed to deliver two prescriptions to an elderly patient – a task that was not part of her ordinary job responsibilities. After the delivery, Murray said, the patient checked her bottles and discovered several pills were missing from her oxycodone prescription.

Further, some of the pills in the bottle were larger and had a different imprint than the others, and were later determined to be baclofen, a non-scheduled drug indicated as a muscle relaxant and anti-spasmodic agent, according to Murray.

Coleman later admitted to law enforcement officers that she replaced some of the oxycodone in the prescription bottle with the baclofen and gave the stolen oxycodone to a friend to sell, for which she received $80.

Additional investigation, Murray said, revealed that Coleman had been stealing Suboxone from the pharmacy for her personal use – and told investigators she had stolen one strip per day for roughly one year.

In a statement, Murray said his office and other law-enforcement agencies “take crimes like this seriously … in order to protect the health and safety of our citizens.

“Drug diversion and tampering with consumer products are serious crimes that can endanger the lives of patients” and cause them to suffer “other serious medical risks.”

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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