A former registered nurse who admitted to stealing liquid morphine from the elderly at an assisted living facility was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

Brooke Lewis, 40, appeared Monday in the Fayette County Court of Common Pleas and plead guilty for tampering and theft of drugs after she was caught stealing from Court House Manor on North Glenn Avenue in Washington Court House.

Lewis was indicted July 18 on 18 felony counts. In a jointly-recommended and agreed plea and sentence, Lewis plead guilty to 15 counts: five counts of of tampering with drugs, nine counts of theft of drugs, and one count of aggravated possession of drugs.

She was sentenced to two years in prison on five counts of tampering with drugs, to be concurrent with one another, sentenced to six months on the nine counts of theft of drugs to be served concurrently with one another, and six months on one charge of aggravated possession of drugs to be served concurrently with the other charges for a total of two-and-a-half years in prison.

According to Steven Beathard, Fayette County Court of Common Pleas Judge, Lewis faced a maximum sentence of 34 years in prison on all charges.

As a nurse, Lewis admitted to stealing liquid morphine, oxycodone, tramadol, and adderall over a period of time beginning in November 2015 and continuing into February of 2016.

Lewis wrote a four-page statement to the Ohio State Board of Health and described those thefts. In her statement, she wrote that she gave her patients their recommended dose of pain medicine, but she said if the patient didn’t ask for it, then she would steal it. She said she always gave the pain medicine to the patients who asked for it and said they needed it.

She said she started using heroin due to her overwhelming depression and anxiety, and her boyfriend pressured and manipulated her to get narcotics from Court House Manor so that he could sell them on the street.

Employees of Court House Manor reported finding unopened bottles of liquid morphine in the narcotics drawer with needle punctures. Lewis admitted that she would use a syringe or needle to extract the liquid morphine from the bottles.

Lewis was ordered to pay the costs of prosecution and was conveyed from court by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office to Corrections Reception Center in Orient, Ohio, to commence serving her sentence. She had zero days of jail-time credit.