SALON

Thursday, Sep 27, 2012 1:45 PM UTC

Co-workers: We worried about Mass. chemist’s work

By

Topics: From the Wires,

BOSTON (AP) — Chemists who worked with the woman at the center of a Massachusetts state drug lab scandal told investigators they had concerns about her work for several years, but they either convinced themselves they were invalid or reported them to supervisors who failed to intervene.

Defense attorneys say they’re troubled by the latest revelations in the case, contained in a lengthy state police report compiled for the attorney general’s office, which is investigating, and obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Annie Dookhan admitted to investigators that she faked drug sample results for two to three years, forged signatures and skipped proper procedures, according to the report.

Attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, who represents several defendants whose samples Dookhan handled, called for federal officials to take over the probe.

“I can’t imagine she could have been this corrupt without someone noticing,” she said. “The investigation needs to go deeper than Annie Dookhan to get to the point of ‘How did she get away with it?’”

State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples submitted in the cases of about 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the Boston lab. She resigned in March amid an internal investigation by the Department of Public Health. A handful of defendants have already been released or had their sentences suspended, and the state has created a central office to examine cases Dookhan was involved with and figure out how to deal with them.

After state police took over the lab in July as part of a state budget directive, they said they discovered her violations were much more extensive than previously believed and went beyond sloppiness into deliberate evidence mishandling.

Supervisors suspended Dookhan’s lab duties in June 2011, when she was caught forging a colleague’s initials on paperwork after taking 90 drug samples from evidence, according to police. But she told police later she disobeyed orders and continued to access an evidence database and give law enforcement officials information on their cases.

On Aug. 30, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered state police to close the lab.

That day, a police lieutenant spoke with Dookhan to tell her she should get an attorney because she could face criminal charges.

Dookhan cried on the phone. She said she was involved in a long divorce from her husband, didn’t have money and didn’t know any lawyers.

Anne Goldbach from Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees legal representation for indigents, said the interviews included in the police report show the problems at the now-closed Hinton State Laboratory are more troubling than originally believed. She said it appears there was unsupervised access to the evidence office and safe.

Goldbach said because Dookhan was in charge of quality control equipment, other chemists could have gotten false test results without knowing it.

“It calls into question all the testing done by the lab,” she said.

Attorney John T. Martin said Wednesday that he noticed a pattern of suspicious behavior from Dookhan while looking over his clients’ cases.

He said in four cases, Dookhan determined the weight of the drug sample was just 1 gram above the amount needed for a more serious penalty even though police reports made the seizure seem smaller.

Concerns from Dookhan’s colleagues prompted two supervisors to audit her work in 2010, but they just looked at paperwork and didn’t retest drug samples.

Things started to unravel in spring 2011 with the forging incident. A colleague told police it was “almost like Dookhan wanted to get caught.”

One lab supervisor told police later that he believed Dookhan had a mental breakdown.

Dookhan told investigators several times in an August interview that she knew she had done wrong.

“I screwed up big time,” she said, according to the report from investigators for Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office. “I messed up bad. It’s my fault. I don’t want the lab to get in trouble.”

Authorities haven’t filed charges against Dookhan or commented on her possible motives as their probe continues. Dookhan hasn’t responded to repeated requests for comment.

In the Aug. 28 interview with two investigators at her home, Dookhan first denied doing anything wrong when she analyzed drug samples.

She changed her story after they confronted her with a retest of a suspected cocaine sample that came back negative after Dookhan identified it as the narcotic. Police also told her the number of samples she reported analyzing was too high and she couldn’t have completed all the tests.

The report shows Dookhan then admitted identifying drug samples by looking at them instead of testing them, called dry labbing.

She said she tested about five out of 25 samples she got from evidence, after routinely getting a large number of samples from different cases out of the evidence room. She also told investigators that she contaminated samples a few times to get more work finished but that no one asked her to do anything improper.

“I intentionally turned a negative sample into a positive a few times,” Dookhan said in a signed statement she gave police.

Dookhan also told investigators she routinely skirted proper procedures by looking up data for assistant district attorneys who called her directly.

More Bridget Murphy.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • This photo. President Barack Obama has a laugh during the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tx., Thursday. Former first lady Barbara Bush, who candidly admitted this week we've had enough Bushes in the White House, is unamused.
    Reuters/Jason Reed

  • Rescue workers converge Wednesday in Savar, Bangladesh, where the collapse of a garment building killed more than 300. Factory owners had ignored police orders to vacate the work site the day before.
    AP/A.M. Ahad

  • Police gather Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus officer Sean Collier, who was allegedly killed in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week.
    AP/Elise Amendola

  • Police tape closes the site of a car bomb that targeted the French embassy in Libya Tuesday. The explosion wounded two French guards and caused extensive damage to Tripoli's upscale al-Andalus neighborhood.
    AP/Abdul Majeed Forjani

  • Protestors rage outside the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday following the rape of a 5-year-old girl in New Delhi. The girl was allegedly kidnapped and tortured before being abandoned in a locked room for two days.
    AP/Manish Swarup

  • Clarksville, Mo., residents sit in a life boat Monday after a Mississippi River flooding, the 13th worst on record.
    AP/Jeff Roberson

  • Workers pause Wednesday for a memorial service at the site of the West, Tx., fertilizer plant explosion, which killed 14 people and left a crater more than 90 feet wide.
    AP/The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel

  • Aerial footage of the devastation following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province last Saturday. At least 180 people were killed and as many as 11,000 injured in the quake.
    AP/Liu Yinghua

  • On Wednesday, Hazmat-suited federal authorities search a martial arts studio in Tupelo, Miss., once operated by Everett Dutschke, the newest lead in the increasingly twisty ricin case. Last week, President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., and a Mississippi judge were each sent letters laced with the deadly poison.
    AP/Rogelio V. Solis

  • The lighting of Freedom Hall at the George W. Bush Presidential Center Thursday is celebrated with (what else but) red, white and blue fireworks.
    AP/David J. Phillip

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Facebook has been used to find ex-lovers, childhood BFFs or the one who got away. He used it to find the guy who, without his consent, made him his drug mule.
259 points260 points | 28 comments
vote
“This could be a career ender for Michele Bachmann”
186 points187 points | 82 comments
vote
Poll: 3 in 10 voters say “armed revolution might be necessary” - 29% say they believe they'll have to act "in order to protect our liberties" in the next few years
48 points49 points | 18 comments
vote
"New evidence reveals big banks still illegally foreclosing on thousands of homes – and weak settlement allows it."
29 points30 points | comment
vote
Are millennials delusional? New research suggests that members of "Generation Me" are warped by a profound sense of entitlement
27 points28 points | 24 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: "The Shelter Cycle": Raised in a cult

Recommendations