Lab chief faces sentencing in Michigan 12 years after fatal US meningitis outbreak
HOWELL, MI — Days after a routine injection to ease back pain, Donna Kruzich and a friend drove across the border into Canada in 2012 to see the end-of-summer theater in Stratford, Ontario.
The 78-year-old Michigan woman suddenly became ill and returned home. By early October she was dead.
“Most of the time she couldn’t communicate with us. She was basically in a coma,” son Michael Kruzich recalled. “We knew she had meningitis, but we didn’t know how she got it.”
Evidence soon emerged: Donna Kruzich was one of at least 64 people in the US who died as a result of contaminated steroids made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. Nearly a dozen years later, the operator of the New England Compounding Center will return to a Michigan court Thursday for his involuntary manslaughter sentencing.
Barry Cadden is already serving a 14.5-year prison sentence for federal crimes related to the extraordinary outbreak of fungal infections, which were traced to filthy laboratory conditions and caused meningitis and other debilitating diseases. More than 700 people in 20 states became ill, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Michigan is the only state to have charged Cadden and a key employee, pharmacist Glenn Chin, in any deaths.
Cadden, 57, recently pleaded no contest to 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter in a deal that took second-degree murder charges off the table. Prosecutors also agreed to a minimum prison sentence of 10 years, which will run concurrently with the federal sentence.
That means it’s unlikely he’ll have to spend any more time in custody, an outcome that disappoints Michael Kruzich.
“My mother is gone, and Cadden and Chin are responsible for it. My family would like to see Cadden brought to justice. It feels like the clock is running out and they just want it done,” he said, referring to the state. prosecutors.
Attorney General Dana Nessel said most of the 11 families supported the settlement.
“We have ensured that this plea reflects their desire for closure and justice,” she said in a written statement on March 5.
Cadden’s attorney, Gerald Gleeson II, declined to comment prior to sentencing. In 2017, Cadden said in federal court in Boston that he regretted the “whole range of suffering” that occurred.
Chin has not reached a similar plea deal, court records show, and his trial on 11 counts of second-degree murder is pending in the same court in Livingston County, 60 miles northwest of Detroit. He is also serving a 10 1/2 year federal sentence.
The New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, operated in a little-known but vital corner of the American healthcare system. Compounding pharmacies make versions of medications that are often not available from larger drug manufacturers.
For example, children may need an adjusted dose that is different from what is usual for adults.
“They are very important,” said Eric Kastango, a pharmacist and industry expert who testified for prosecutors in the federal trial against Cadden. “I don’t think the general public necessarily knows what pharmacists do. They know they are going to a hospital and they may need an IV. They may not know who made it or how they made it.”
In 2012, New England Compounding shipped pain-relieving steroids to doctors across the US, including a clinic in Brighton, Michigan, where Donna Kruzich and others were treated. But the laboratory was a mess, which led to the growth of mold during the production process.
“The environment quickly spiraled out of control,” Michigan prosecutors said in a lawsuit last June.
Researchers “discovered a company that put profit over human lives. Barry Cadden was the ‘big boss’ at NECC, who made many of the company’s major decisions,” the state said. “He cut back on safety.”
Crime victims can speak in court in Michigan. Michael Kruzich, 70, said he will not attend Thursday, although he has submitted a poem on behalf of his family.
He told The Associated Press that his mother was a “healthy, happy woman” who loved to travel and was treasurer of her golf league in the Ann Arbor area.
“Twelve years ago I was told that you could do no more harm to a person than to kill him,” Kruzich said in his poem. “I don’t agree: you can do more harm to them if justice fails them.”
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Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this story.
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