Man enters Alford plea in Eastern Panhandle pill mill case

MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — A Lexington, Ky., man charged in connection with an Eastern Panhandle pill mill case involving often-abused prescription drugs entered an Alford plea on Friday to one count of prescription fraud.

Sedrick Gilbert, 71, entered the plea as a part of a deferred adjudication agreement that was reached in his case and accepted by 23rd Judicial Circuit Judge Bridget Cohee.

If Gilbert successfully completes a three-year probation-like period, he will be allowed to enter a misdemeanor count of possession of a controlled substance, according to the terms of the agreement. A six-count indictment is to be dismissed.

An Alford plea is not an admission of guilt, but an acknowledgment by a defendant that the prosecution has enough evidence to gain a conviction.

Prior to entering the plea, Gilbert told the court that the allegations in the case "was something I got caught up in" and that he didn't have a prior criminal record.

Gilbert was accused of knowingly bringing a prescription for oxycodone that he obtained fraudulently to City Pharmacy in Martinsburg in February, March and April 2014, court records said.

The pharmacy, which has since closed, was at the center of the state's pill mill case against pharmacist David Wasanyi, who was convicted of 13 counts of delivery of a controlled substance in October 2016 and subsequently sentenced in in Berkeley County Circuit Court to serve five to 75 years in prison. A similar case filed against Wasanyi in Jefferson County Circuit Court was dismissed at the state's request in June 2017, records said.

Gilbert's sister, Imogene Abshear of Lancaster, Ky., another defendant connected to Wasanyi's case, was placed on probation for three years after she pleaded guilty in November 2016 to obtaining a controlled substance by fraud or forgery, records said.

According to allegations in a pending federal case seeking civil penalties for violations of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, Wasanyi or the pharmacies he controlled and managed filled more than 1,100 illegitimate prescriptions from 2010 into 2015 for controlled substances written by medical providers and residents in multiple states, records said.

The government alleges that the pharmacies filled prescriptions for Schedule II and Schedule III controlled substances that were written by 45 "discrete" physicians located in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, records said.

The prescriptions were written for "patients" in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, records said.

Most of the prescriptions — 957 — were written for "patients" who were residents of Kentucky and Ohio and all of the patients traveled considerable distance to the Eastern Panhandle to have the prescriptions filled, records said.