THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SPOKANE, Wash. — The Spokane Fire Department is reviewing all cases in which drugs were administered in the last year after authorities alleged a department paramedic stole drugs from a fire station and possibly replaced some with saline solution before putting the bottles back into service.
Fire Chief Bobby Williams said the review was a precaution and there is no indication that any patients received salt water rather than medications.
“We have no verification that anybody received, or were impacted by that,” Williams said after he was told of the contents of court documents containing the allegations.
Only about 200 of the thousands of calls the department receives in a typical year involve paramedics administering drugs, he said in an article published Friday in The Spokesman-Review newspaper.
Rebecca J. Singley, 32, a fire paramedic who was found unconscious from a possible drug overdose in a Spokane fire station May 30. Detectives have forwarded affidavits to the Spokane County prosecutor’s office, but Singley has not yet been charged.
According to police reports, Singley told investigators she stole and used powerful narcotic painkillers, analgesics and sedatives from the station’s inventory in the week before injecting herself with Etomidate, a short-acting sedative and hypnotic agent.
She told police she refilled 10 bottles of various narcotics with a sterile saline solution of salt and water.
Singley is on paid administrative leave. The department will start its own internal investigation once the legal case is resolved, Williams said.
Singley did not return a call left with her mother for comment.
She worked at two fire stations during the time she told police she diverted drugs for her own use, but only refilled bottles when she transferred to her most recent assignment in early April, the documents state.
In most cases, Singley told detectives, she took the drugs while doing inventory, the documents state. Those bottles would have been disposed of, rather than refilled, because they were past the expiration date.
Detective Chet Gilmore wrote that there is physical evidence only for Singley’s unlawful possession of Etomidate, Demerol, morphine and Ativan. The other drugs she said she took were only supported by the Fire Department’s inventory sheets, according to court documents.
Singley told investigators she believed many department employees take home non-narcotic remedies - such as epinephrine “pens” and syrup of ipecac to promotes vomiting in certain poisonings - when they expire, Gilmore wrote in his statement of probable cause.
“I would not expect that that would be a routine procedure,” Williams said. “And it would not be something that the department condones.”