Key NECC Witness Challenged by Defense

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Boston--The testimony of a key prosecution witness was challenged today when the lawyer for a defendant said his client was vacationing in the Dominican Republic at the very time she was alleged to have been involved in an incriminating event at her Massachusetts workplace.
The challenge came during the cross examination of a former employee of the company blamed for a deadly fungal meningitis outbreak. That witness, Joseph Connolly, also has been a key prosecution witness in the prior trials of two co-defendants.
Challenging Connolly was Michael Pineault representing defendant Sharon Carter, who is one of six people on trial in U.S. District Court on racketeering and conspiracy charges stemming from a two year probe of the outbreak caused by contaminated drugs from the company that employed Carter and Connolly.
Also appearing on the witness stand Wednesday was another former employee of the defunct New England Compounding Center who testified in detail about the involvement of some of the defendants, who were licensed pharmacists yet approved the shipment of drugs that were untested. He also told jurors that NECC routinely disguised the actual source of drugs, mixing the origin of tested drugs with those that weren't.
The 2012 outbreak caused by fungus laden NECC steroids sickened 778 patients across the country killing 76 of them. Sixteen of the dead were patients in Tennessee, the state where the outbreak was first detected.
Connolly, who had been on the witness stand for several hours Tuesday, was confronted on cross examination by Michael Pineault, Carter's lawyer, who displayed passport records showing his client was vacationing in the Dominican Republic at the time when a disputed order came in.
Connolly had testified that he spoke with Carter on May 30, 2012 about the order and, after she met with NECC President Barry Cadden, he was ordered to send out the untested drugs.
Pineault said his client wasn't even at NECC on May 25 when the order was placed nor was she there on May 30, the date of the alleged conversation with Connolly.
He said that internal NECC emails showed she also had set up an automated message stating that she would be out of the office from May 25 through May 31 of that year. The emails were entered into evidence but the passport records were not.
Connolly had testified that the order to ship an untested drug came just one day after he and other NECC employees were told the operation had to be "fireproofed" and hence forward all drugs would be quarantined for two weeks, the time needed for an outside laboratory to test for purity and potency.
"So your prediction came true," Pineault said to Connolly, after noting that Connolly had predicted that the May 30 testing order would be reversed as soon as a rush order came through.
Connolly, however, said he did talk with Carter about the order and that it was his boss, Glenn Chin, who told him to ship the untested order to the Hawaii client.
Following Connolly's testimony another former NECC employee, Owen Finnegan, a pharmacy technician, told jurors that all of his work at NECC, had to be done under the supervision of a licensed pharmacist, including three of the defendants. One of the three also had to review his work preparing prescriptions before they could be shipped out, he said.
Finnegan reaffirmed much of Connolly's testimony including the extensive verbal and physical horseplay in the clean room where sterile drugs were being prepared. He described how one worker was shoved headfirst along a conveyor belt used to send completed drugs to NECC's shipping department.
"I was over there myself," Finnegan said.
Though the technician said he at first looked forward to going to work at NECC, that changed in 2012 when there was a substantial uptick in work and a downturn in quality.
Citing the increased tension to fill orders quickly Finnegan said he was at the point of looking for another job when NECC was shutdown in October 2012 as the federal investigation of the outbreak intensified.
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