Las Vegas Assisted Living Employee Caught Stealing From Elderly Patients

By Dane Enerio

Representation. An elderly person holding a cane. Alexas_Fotos/Pixabay

KEY POINTS

• A woman, 41, stole the personal information of residents of an assisted living facility in Las Vegas
• The woman, who carried out the theft while working at the facility, used the information for personal purchases
• She was arrested Sunday and booked on multiple charges, including the exploitation of a vulnerable person

A 41-year-old woman has been accused of stealing from the elderly residents of a Las Vegas, Nevada, assisted living facility that she worked at, according to authorities.

Tami Friend was booked on three counts of theft over $5,000, exploiting an older or vulnerable person and using another person's identification following her arrest Sunday, newspaper the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, citing a press release from the city's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

While working at an undisclosed Las Vegas assisted living facility, Friend stole the personal information of residents and used the data for personal purchases, police claimed.

Further details on Friend's case were not immediately available.

Friend, who has since been booked into the Clark County Detention Center, may have more victims, according to authorities.

Police have urged anyone with information about Friend to reach the MPD's Financial Crimes Section at 702-828-3483.

Tipsters wishing to remain anonymous can contact Crime Stoppers by phone at 702-385-5555 or on the internet via their website.

In a similar story, a couple in the United Kingdom posed as nurses to steal morphine and painkillers from the houses of terminally ill patients.

Ruth Lambert and Jessica Silvester, two female paramedics from the southeastern English county of Kent, were sentenced to jail for five years each after they pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to burgle and conspiring to commit theft.

The two stole the medication prescribed to patients receiving end-of-life care while posing as nurses.

They also collected medication from three houses by convincing residents that they were from the health department collecting medicines after the deaths of patients.

Authorities arrested Lambert and Silvester in August last year after police received multiple complaints of burglaries, and they were identified through surveillance cameras.

Investigators found medications that had the names of other people, nurses' uniforms and a computer stolen from the health department at the couple's residence in Gap Road, Margate.

Lambert and Silvester carried out 29 burglaries in and around Kent, stealing medication such as morphine and painkillers to feed their drug addiction.

"This was an extraordinarily callous and uncaring form of exploitation of the most vulnerable people often when they were terminally ill or dying or in some cases when they had actually died," a judge said during the duo's sentencing.

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Las Vegas Assisted Living Employee Caught Stealing From Elderly Patients