A Jackson County grand jury has indicted a former Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center nurse on 44 counts of felony assault for allegedly diverting drugs that affected patient health at the Medford hospital.
The Medford Police Department reports detectives arrested 36-year-old Dani Marie Schofield in the 5,000-block of Rogue River Drive on Thursday afternoon.
The seven-month-long investigation began after Asante officials contacted MPD in early December 2023. Asante had become concerned with a rising number of central line infection cases in patients while in their care.
After an internal investigation, Asante provided MPD with information that all of the identified cases were isolated to patients in the Intensive Care Unit and occurred within a specific time frame. Based on records and interviews, detectives were able to determine that ICU nurse Schofield had access to each of the victims.
There was concern that Schofield had been diverting patients' liquid fentanyl for her personal use and then replacing it with tap water, causing serious infections that may have led to some patients' deaths. Schofield left Asante in July 2023.
MPD investigators made contact with Schofield early on in this investigation. They also spent months pouring through volumes of hospital records and interviewed nearly 100 people in this case including doctors, nurses, patients and families. Due to the magnitude of the case and its impact on victims, MPD dedicated multiple full-time detectives to the investigation. MPD provided results of the investigation to the Jackson County District Attorney's Office for review and prosecution.
Following the indictment, Dani Schofield is being held on $4.4 million bail in the Jackson County Jail for 44 counts of 2nd-Degree Assault under Measure 11. MPD consulted with multiple medical experts, who each agreed that questionable deaths associated with this case could not be directly attributed to the infections.
