A former Eagle River nurse practitioner convicted on charges that she killed patients by overprescribing millions of opioid pills was sentenced Thursday in federal court to serve 30 years in prison.
Former Eagle River Wellness owner Jessica Spayd, 52, was officially charged in five deaths stemming from her prescription of opioids, but prosecutors say her actions contributed to 20 confirmed deaths and is suspected to be a factor in dozens of others.
The case is the deadliest known drug offense to ever happen in Alaska, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Tansey said during Thursday’s hearing. He described Spayd in a sentencing memorandum as a “serial killer with a ‘poison pen.’ ”
Spayd, an advanced nurse practitioner, advertised Eagle River Wellness as an addiction treatment clinic specializing in the use of Suboxone, a medication that can be used to treat opioid addiction. But Spayd prescribed nearly 40 other drugs — mostly narcotics — more often than Suboxone, according to a sworn affidavit written by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in support of a warrant for her arrest.
She came to the attention of the DEA because of a number of red flags: Patients traveled long distances within the state to see her, she wrote second prescriptions for people whose first prescription shouldn’t have already run out, and patients used multiple addresses, names and pharmacies to avoid detection.
Spayd was originally charged in 2019, and she surrendered her nurse practitioner license in 2020.
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Her status as a medical professional makes her crimes more egregious, Tansey said, because she treated vulnerable patients who trusted her to have their best interest in mind. Instead, he said Spayd routinely prescribed dangerously high levels of the drugs to patients she knew had become addicted and were abusing the medications.
In total, Spayd prescribed more than 4.4 million doses of opioid narcotics to roughly 450 patients between 2014 and 2019, according to Tansey. During her 20-year career, Spayd likely prescribed more than 18 million pills, Tansey wrote.
She significantly fueled the opioid epidemic in the state, he said.
“Two years after her arrest, the amount of opioid prescriptions in the state declined by 30% — that’s 1.3 million pills that she would have put into Alaska that were not there only because of her arrest,” Tansey said.
Spayd knew that her prescriptions were killing people, Tansey said. Investigators found a list she kept of patients who died from 2004 until 2011, he said. By that point, Tansey wrote that Spayd herself had classified five of those deaths as overdoses. More overdose deaths were uncovered by investigators from that list, which Spayd had falsely attributed to other causes, he said.
One question was at the center of Thursday’s sentencing hearing: Why did Spayd do this?
That answer may never be known, U.S. District Court Judge Joshua Kindred said. In similar crimes, greed and financial gain are the motive, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for Spayd, he said. While she made enough to live comfortably, she did not earn an excessive salary and a number of her patients used Medicare or Medicaid, said her attorney, Steven Wells. She earned roughly $1.3 million in five years.
“I do look at Ms. Spayd and she’s not the embodiment of pure evil, she’s not someone who the court can really hold hardness in my heart for — I’ve watched her testify, watched her on video — she’s in many ways a sad person. And I think that may make this crime even worse,” Kindred said. “If it was greed, at least I could understand it, but here time and time again people went to her for comfort, they went to her for guidance, they went to her for medical treatment. And time and time again, she failed in her most basic foundational obligation — to do no harm.”
Tansey said he believes Spayd used her clients for her own emotional gratification because they helped her normalize her own addictions and mental health issues. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had previously sought treatment for alcohol and substance abuse. She was abusing drugs during the years that she was excessively prescribing them to patients, he said.
Defense attorney Wells said during the hearing that he also doesn’t know why Spayd overprescribed medication. He said he’s come to believe that she did it because she felt unable to say no to patients who she saw as clearly being in pain or dependent on the drugs.
“Somebody has to be the adult in the room and say no, and Ms. Spayd had a hard time saying no,” he said.
In a brief statement to the court, Spayd apologized Thursday for causing pain and suffering. She said she agreed with Wells’ assessment of why she continued to overprescribe the medications.
Several victims spoke during the hearing, including a woman whose dad died and a woman whose husband fell into addiction and died after their divorce. The women described watching their loved ones slip into addictions that fundamentally changed who they were — they became angry, withdrawn and entirely dependent on drugs.
Janice Park said her then-husband was Spayd’s patient for about a decade and was prescribed increasingly higher doses of medication through the years, including prescriptions for fentanyl. Staff at the clinic refused to address her concerns, and called the police when she visited the clinic to talk with Spayd about her husband’s growing addiction, Park said.
The other woman said Spayd pushed her father into an addiction that killed him and took away her trust in medical professionals. She now “can’t go to a medical office without wondering if they’re doing things correctly.”
Spayd not only killed their loved ones, the women said, but ruined the lives of the hundreds of family members left to grapple with their loved ones’ addictions.
After a monthlong trial, a jury convicted Spayd in October on five counts of distributing and dispensing a controlled substance that resulted in death, four charges of distributing and dispensing a controlled substance and one count of “maintaining drug involved premises” at her former Eagle River Wellness pain clinic.
Tansey on Thursday asked Kindred to sentence Spayd to life in prison, a sentence doled out to similar offenders in cases that resulted in fewer deaths than Spayd had caused. Sentencing her to the minimum mandatory sentence, 20 years, would essentially be giving her a “bulk discount” on death, he argued.
Wells argued that the court should sentence Spayd to the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence. Spayd was not likely to commit the same crime in the future or harm others, he said, and a 20-year sentence would mean she will likely spend most of her remaining years in prison.
Kindred sentenced Spayd to 30 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Wells and Spayd were glad the court didn’t sentence her to life in prison, he said, and they plan to file an appeal.
Park said that she understands the sentence will effectively mean Spayd will spend most of the rest of her life behind bars, but she doesn’t know whether 30 years is enough to account for the damage Spayd caused. Park had asked Kindred to sentence Spayd to life during the hearing.
“I just don’t know that that’s enough for the amount of damage that she’s done, not just to the people who were addicted, not just to their family, but to the entire community,” Park said.