EAST ORANGE, N.J. (1010 WINS) -- A woman who worked as a pharmacy technician at a Veterans Affairs center in New Jersey has been arrested and charged with stealing more than $8.2 million worth of HIV medication from the site, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Orange resident Lisa Hoffman, 48, was charged with theft of medical products on Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey said in a press release.
Hoffman, who worked at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in East Orange, was supposed to order medications and other supplies for the center’s outpatient pharmacy, the attorney’s office said.
Between August 2017 and November 2019, however, Hoffman ordered large batches of HIV medication for the center, then pocketed the drugs, prosecutors said.
Surveillance cameras posted inside the center captured the technician “regularly taking dozens of bottles of HIV medications from the shelves of the outpatient pharmacy, placing them in a white mail bin, and ten transferring the medications from the mail bin to her bag,” according to prosecutors.
After she left the center with the medications, Hoffman would sell them to a Lyndhurst resident named Wagner Checonolasco, the attorney’s office said.
Checonolasco, who has already been charged with conspiracy to steal government property, then resold the medications to others, prosecutors said.
Hoffman could face up to 20 years in prison if she is convicted, the attorney’s office said. Her attorney information wasn’t immediately available Wednesday.