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One Bad Doctor: Richard Johns Pill Mill Scheme Leads to Death of One, Ensnares Dozens

10 min read

Curtis Norris had made some bad decisions. He dropped out of Cabot High School and his work history was spotty. But, as far as his mother knew, he didn’t have a real drug problem before he hooked up with Marissa Scroggins months before he died.

Brenda Birmingham thought Marissa was another of Curt’s bad decisions, but you don’t tell a 25-year-old man whom he can spend his time with. Besides, Curt loved Marissa’s toddler and sometimes referred to the boy as “my son”; now Birmingham wishes he really were her grandson.

Birmingham can’t remember exactly how long her son was involved with Marissa Scroggins, but she’s sure it was less than a year. She’s also convinced that he was not using opioids regularly in the fall of 2014 because he had passed a pre-employment drug test three weeks before his death and he knew he was subject to random testing.

This much is certain: Curt Norris had bought oxycodone as part of an illegal drug distribution organization managed by Marissa’s father, David Scroggins.

Norris was one of about four dozen associates who would fill oxycodone prescriptions for David Scroggins in exchange for cash and perhaps a share of the pills. So when Norris came down with what he thought was flu — an autopsy would diagnose pneumonia — and the pain got the best of him, he had a lethal dose of at least six 30-milligram tablets readily available to pulverize and inject.

On Nov. 8, 2014, a young detective from the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the Scroggins house on Pickthorne Road, just outside the Cabot city limits, to find that the first death he was ever assigned to investigate was that of a high school classmate. Using a state prescription database and shoe leather, Detective Clint Eifling would trace the fraudulent prescriptions for Norris’ pills and tens of thousands more, resulting in more than 70 arrests representing what prosecutors believe are the largest drug rings ever busted in both Lonoke and White counties.

By the end of this month, at least 52 people will have pleaded guilty, including David Scroggins, Marissa Scroggins and the one bad doctor who was the indispensable element: Richard Duane Johns.

“He’s a drug dealer,” Chuck Graham, the prosecuting attorney for the 23rd Judicial District that comprises Lonoke County, said of Johns. “I keep trying to think of something else to call him. He’s a drug dealer.”

$1 Million in Pills
Johns, 51, of Little Rock, appeared in federal court earlier this month and pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute oxycodone without an effective prescription. But while his lawyers negotiated the charges down from seven counts to one, Johns’ plea deal acknowledged that he sold, typically for $500 each, enough fraudulent prescriptions in the names of patients he might never have met to procure at least 39,000 oxycodone pills.

The street value of oxycodone is estimated at $30 per pill — well over $1 million total — of which perhaps $200,000 went directly to Johns.

And that was just in the 17 months between Jan. 1, 2014, and May 2015, which wasn’t the entire period of his crimes. Johns also confessed that he was selling prescriptions in 2012, while prosecutors say he started even earlier.

Johns was taken into custody by federal marshals immediately after his March 2 plea.

When he is sentenced in a few months, he’s looking at a stretch in federal prison that is likely to be nine to 12 years, if U.S. District Judge Brian Miller follows the federal sentencing guideline.

He agreed to forfeit $155,620 in cash that was seized under a search warrant and a 2006 Ford F150. Prosecutors are hoping Miller will order Johns to turn over additional proceeds from his crime, but they couldn’t reach an agreement with the defense.

Johns’ plea deal did not require him to accept personal responsibility for the death of Curtis Norris, something that infuriates Birmingham.

“This breaks my heart,” she said last week. “Even though he’s going to prison for a while, he’s not being punished for my son’s death. … I guess it shouldn’t matter why he’s in prison, but it does matter.”

Birmingham is pursuing a million-dollar civil claim against Johns in Lonoke County Circuit Court.

Cochran Connection
Norris’ death in Cabot prompted the investigation, and most of the defendants in the related cases were from Lonoke County. But Johns acknowledged under oath that he was selling oxycodone prescriptions to a young Searcy man, Aron Scot Cochran, well before he started selling prescriptions to David Scroggins in the summer of 2014.

Exactly how much earlier is a point of contention. When Cochran pleaded guilty in federal court in November, he acknowledged having paid Johns for enough prescriptions for approximately 2,700 oxycodone tablets beginning about June 2011. Bud Cummins, one of Johns’ defense attorneys, told the court that his client believed he started selling prescriptions to Cochran at least a year later, in the last half of 2012.

Cochran, 27, has not yet been sentenced, but his plea agreement suggests a guideline range of four to five years in federal prison.

Cochran was among 18 defendants, nine from Lonoke County and nine from White County, who were indicted with Johns and whose prosecutions have been handled by Anne Gardner and John Ray White, assistant U.S. attorneys in U.S. Attorney Christopher Thyer’s office in Little Rock.

In addition to those defendants, 15 other White County residents pleaded guilty in White County Circuit Court to filling the prescriptions that Cochran paid Johns to prescribe in their names. Their sentences ranged from misdemeanor probation to 72 months of incarceration in the Arkansas Department of Correction, according to Prosecuting Attorney Rebecca Reed, depending on their criminal history and other factors.

(Related: Misconduct Allegations Shadowed Richard Johns)

The Business Plan
Reed was the drug case prosecutor in White County for 18 years before being elected prosecutor two years ago, but two decades of prosecuting drug crimes had not prepared her for the Johns-Cochran connection.

Most of her previous painkiller cases “have just been individual people who were addicted to pills,” Reed said. They would typically alter a legitimate prescription in order to get more pills from the pharmacy.

“Rarely did they sell them. They would get them and keep them,” Reed said.

She might prosecute 15 or 20 of those cases a year.

Reed once became suspicious that a doctor might have been too lenient in prescribing painkillers to a certain patient. But never had she seen a case in which a doctor actually sold fraudulent prescriptions the way Johns did.

“I think a lot of law enforcement was surprised by how intricate and expansive his ring was,” Reed said.

While Johns’ conspiracy has been referred to, in Arkansas Business and elsewhere, as a “pill mill,” his business plan was not typical. A more typical pill mill was KJ Medical Clinic, which operated on Hermitage Road in west Little Rock, in sight of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s local office.

At KJ, painkillers were prescribed to almost anyone who walked through the door with $150 or $200 in cash. (Eighteen people were convicted in that conspiracy after federal agents shut it down in May 2015.)

But if KJ was a retail operation, Johns was engaged in multilevel marketing. Cochran and then David Scroggins would provide him with patients, often just names and birthdates, and Johns would write prescriptions and even suggest where the prescriptions should be filled.

Cochran and Scroggins enlisted participants to fill the prescriptions in exchange for cash and pills, Detective Eifling reported. Some of these “third level” conspirators then enlisted “fourth level” participants.

“The fourth level (user/low level) will fill the prescription and receive compensation in the form of 10 pills or $100 cash or other variants. The fourth level will then turn the filled prescription over to the third level. The third level will take their compensation [of] 20 pills or $200 or other variants. The third level will then either sell the remainder of the prescription and pay D. Scroggins for it or return the remainder to D. Scroggins to use or sell,” Eifling wrote in an affidavit.

In court, while tearfully admitting that he sold prescriptions to Cochran and Scroggins, Johns denied knowing what became of the painkillers he prescribed.

Scroggins Connection
Johns started selling prescriptions to David Scroggins in July 2014, four months before Curtis Norris died. Nailing that down is a much more exact science than determining when the Cochran conspiracy began, thanks to the Arkansas Prescription Monitoring Program, which was created by an act of the Legislature in 2011. On March 1, 2013, pharmacies statewide began reporting at least once a week on all prescriptions they dispensed for certain “schedule” drugs that have a high risk of abuse.

When Detective Eifling arrived at the Scroggins house on the day of Norris’ death, Marissa Scroggins told him that her boyfriend had severe neck and back injuries and had “shot up” six 30-milligram oxycodone tablets the previous evening. The medicine, she told the detective, had been prescribed by Dr. Richard Johns.

But when Eifling notified Norris’ family of the death, his older half brother, Eric Jones, denied that Norris had any injuries requiring painkillers. Instead, he said, Norris had filled fraudulent prescriptions at Cabot Pharmacy.

“Jones stated that D. Scroggins paid Norris $400 to go to Richard Johns and get the prescription and given them back to D. Scroggins to sell,” Eifling wrote in an affidavit when he first sought access to the Prescription Monitoring Program data. He requested all prescriptions written by Johns between January and November 2014 and all prescriptions written for Norris and members of the Scroggins family, including Donna Banks-Scroggins, who was David’s wife and Marissa’s mother.

“This case would never, ever have been able to be completed without the PMP,” Eifling said last week. “It was essential in this case.”

Eifling spent the next four months piecing together data from the PMP, information from confidential informants and a list of names written on the back of a patient chart that was recovered from David Scroggins.

On April 7, 2015, the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office, the DEA and the Arkansas State Police executed a search warrant on Richard Johns’ home and office in Little Rock as well as his vehicle.

Johns surrendered his DEA license on the spot, making it illegal for him to write any more prescriptions for schedule drugs. The law enforcement officers also collected something else.

“During that search we recovered a notebook on Dr. Johns [sic] person that is directly linked to his illegal enterprise,” Eifling wrote weeks later, in an affidavit seeking an arrest warrant. “Inside the notebook Dr. Johns corresponded numbers and names with the date that he would write the fraudulent prescription for each month. Dr. Johns also annotated beside several names which pharmacy and which city the fraudulent prescription would be filled at.”

The seven-page arrest affidavit lists 187 different oxycodone prescriptions for 90 pills each that Johns had written for 52 different people at David Scroggins’ behest. Curtis Norris’ death didn’t appear to interrupt the business plan, as prescriptions he sold to Scroggins continued to be filled for months afterward.

Two of the 187 prescriptions were written in Curtis Norris’ name — a total of 180 tablets filled at two different pharmacies in Cabot in August 2014, almost three months before he died.

Six of the prescriptions were written in Donna Banks-Scroggins’ name. On June 5, 2016, emergency responders were called to the Scroggins’ house on Pickthorne Road, where Donna was unresponsive and her husband reported that she might have overdosed on prescription medications. She died at Baptist Health Medical Center in North Little Rock at age 50, and an autopsy by the state medical examiner determined that she died of natural causes related to heart disease.

Pilluted
Richard Johns was arrested at his Little Rock office on May 18, 2015, and charged in Lonoke County Circuit Court with 187 counts of prescription drug fraud. The Arkansas State Medical Board began an investigation the next day, and Johns’ license to practice medicine was suspended a couple of weeks later.

And while he was certainly the biggest fish, Johns’ arrest warrant was just one of 50 issued in Lonoke County as a result of Eifling’s investigation — Prosecuting Attorney Chuck Graham is still looking for one of the suspects.

Two days later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Little Rock announced that it had charged 140 people in Arkansas — including the owners and employees of KJ Medical Clinic — as part of a regional DEA investigation of “illegally diverted pharmaceuticals” called “Operation Pilluted.” Johns and his co-defendants weren’t part of that roundup, but the case was mentioned in the announcement because the DEA had assisted with the investigation.

In September 2015, Johns and nine members of the Scroggins ring from Lonoke County were indicted by a federal grand jury in Little Rock, and Graham dropped the charges against them in Lonoke County.

Of the remainder charged in Lonoke County, 18 had their charges dismissed because, Graham said, they were low-level participants who cooperated with authorities. Twenty-one have pleaded guilty.

Of the 18 charged with Johns in federal court, one has had charges dismissed and six have pleaded guilty.

David Scroggins, who will turn 58 next month, and his 37-year-old son, Christopher, were scheduled for guilty pleas on Friday, and Marissa Scroggins, 30, is scheduled for a guilty plea on March 22. Six more co-defendants were also scheduled for pleas this month.

The first federal defendant to plead guilty, Vanessa Byrd, 30, of Ward, was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison. She is currently incarcerated at the minimum-security federal prison camp at Bryan, Texas.

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