Woman accused of spreading hepatitis C says on video she schemed to hide drug habit

DENVER -- A Colorado Springs woman accused of swapping her dirty needles for a powerful painkiller told police she was careful not to use too much in order to hide her drug habit from her operating room colleagues.

Kristen Diane Parker, the 26-year-old former scrub technician at the center of a case involving 10 surgery patients infected with hepatitis C, confessed to switching needles 15 to 20 times over a period of five months while working at hospitals in Denver and Colorado Springs.

In a videotaped interview on June 30, Parker told Denver Police Detective Dale Wallis how she managed to keep her secret while working first for Rose Medical Center in Denver and then at Audubon Surgery Center in Colorado Springs.

"I made my limit," she said during the videotape interview which was played during her detention hearing Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver.

"I didn't want to make it obvious to everybody that I was using," she told Wallis. "I didn't want to lose my job."

Rose fired Parker in April. Audubon fired her after learning that the state health department had banned her from working in hospitals.

After listening to the audiotape of the interview, Magistrate Craig B. Shaffer ordered that Parker continue to be held without bond on charges of tampering with a consumer product, creating a counterfeit controlled substance and obtaining drugs by deceit.

He denied a request by Parker's lawyer Gregory Graf, who had asked that his client be allowed to stay with her father in Elizabeth and wear an electronic ankle monitor while out on bond.

Graf argued that Parker did not fully understand that she had contracted hepatitis C despite the fact that the disease was found in a blood test before she started working at Rose in October.

"You're dealing with a young unsophisticated woman," Graf said outside the courtroom after the hearing. While she was trained as an operating room technician, Parker had not graduated from community college, he said.

Shaffer was not persuaded. He noted that anyone who read the results of the blood test would have been alarmed.

"Other than send a flare up in the sky, I don't know what more you can do," the judge said.

A federal agent testified that the nurse who advised Parker of the test results distinctly remembered the conversation.

"She (the nurse) said most of the time the reaction is shock," said Mary F. LaFrance, a special agent for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, when Parker got her results, "she was completely emotionless. It was like, tell me something I don't already know."

In the taped interview, Parker said she never followed up on the nurse's instructions to see a doctor because she didn't have medical insurance and she hadn't noticed any symptoms.

As prosecutors played the tape of the interview with Wallis, Parker - wearing a striped jail jumpsuit with her hair in a tight double braid - sat hunched forward in her chair, buried her face in her handcuffed hands and began weeping. An unidentified woman in the audience also began crying.

Her arrest on July 3 prompted officials to notify about 4,700 former surgery patients at Rose and another 1,000 at Audubon that they might be at risk for hepatitis C and should be screened.

So far, 9 patients at Rose have contracted the disease, state health officials said. The Denver Post reported a 10th patient has also tested positive for the disease.

Parker could be heard crying on the tape as she talked about the people who had been infected.

"I didn't know this was going to happen, I mean, to the extent that people are getting sick," she said. "It's something I can't take back."

"I really don't care about myself at this point," she added. "I want to get this over with."

Parker waived her right to a preliminary hearing on the charges. However, she still has the right to have her case go before a grand jury, which is how most defendants are charged in federal court.