Witness recounts alleged insurance scheme
A 55-year-old Bethel Park woman testified Wednesday in Fayette County Court that Dr. Mark Fremd proposed that the two of them take part in an insurance scheme the second time she saw him. Janet Matey said Fremd told her he was having financial difficulties and was in bankruptcy proceedings, and he proposed a scheme in which he would bill her insurance company for pain injections she never received.
The 48-year-old Connellsville doctor is charged with multiple violations of the drug act and with defrauding an insurance company.
Matey, who testified tearfully at times, said she was supposed to get 5 percent of the first $100,000 Fremd made from her insurance company, 10 percent of the next $100,000 “and so on.”
But, Matey testified, when Fremd didn’t come through with the money as promised, he devised a new way to pay her: He gave her pain and diet pills and told her she could sell them on the street to make money.
Matey explained that Fremd would sell her the pills and deduct them from what he owed her for insurance costs, and she then sold the pills at double the cost on the street, making $10,000 to $20,000. Matey, as well as others who are testifying against Fremd, are doing so under a grant of immunity and will not be prosecuted for illegal activities.
And, according to testimony, when Fremd, with whom Matey was having a sexual relationship, asked if he also could fraudulently bill her husband, Thomas, for pain injections, Matey agreed.
She testified that she thought she could do that “because my husband was a very trusting man.”
At times, Matey testified, Fremd was giving her so many pills that she had to carry them out of his office in a small plastic bag. Other times, she said, he wrote her prescriptions in either her name or her husband’s.
Matey testified that she stopped seeing Fremd at his Bethel Park office in the spring of 2001, after agents from the attorney general’s office questioned her about him.
“I knew he was in trouble, because he told me. He had his insurance bills and folders of patients’ (records) confiscated,” Matey testified.
She said she initially denied any wrongdoing to investigators, even singing Fremd’s praises, but then she talked to her husband and instructed him to lie for her. Thomas Matey testified that he had no idea about his wife’s dealings with Fremd and told investigators what little he knew.
Fremd’s attorney, Paul Gettleman, expressed disbelief at Matey’s testimony that Fremd decided to approach her on her second visit and propose mutual benefit through insurance fraud.
“So, an intelligent doctor says to a patient he doesn’t even know on the second visit, ‘Hey, you want to defraud an insurance company with me?'” Gettleman asked.
“Yes,” testified Matey, who said her main problem with Fremd between late 1997 and spring 2001, when she stopped seeing him, was his lack of the payment he had promised her.
Matey identified her crime as one of greed, and she said she readily accepted the pills to sell as payment.
“So, for at least 31/2 years, you were a drug dealer?” asked Gettleman.
“Yes,” replied Matey, tearfully.
Matey later testified that she “made a bad decision. I picked a bad doctor. Everything after that I made a wrong decision. It’s my responsibility.”
“So why aren’t you taking responsibility? You have immunity,” said Gettleman. He previously told jurors that he intended to prove that witnesses testifying against Fremd did so out of self-interest, to avoid prosecution.
“I thought it was my second chance,” Matey testified.
Jurors also heard testimony from Jamie McLelland and her former fianc?, Randall Kopler. McLelland testified that, although Fremd wrote several prescriptions for pain pills in her name, she received none.
Kopler testified that he asked the doctor to write the prescriptions in McLelland’s name because “it seemed like (Fremd) was giving me an awful lot of them, and I didn’t want it to look bad.”
A former police officer, Kopler testified that he knew it was illegal to have the prescriptions written in McLelland’s name, but he said that she did, on occasion, take some of the pills.
McLelland, though, testified that she took none.
Two witnesses also testified that they received insurance statements detailing numerous visits to Fremd during which he supposedly gave them pain injections.
Both Tina M. Stockman and Robert Bowers testified that they did not receive the injections that were billed to their insurance companies.
Bowers testified that during some of the supposed injections in 1997 and 1998, he was not even in the state. He had conflicting documentation from his insurance company that showed he was at an out-of-state treatment center when some of the injections allegedly were given.
Deputy Attorney General Andrew Demarest is prosecuting the case.
Testimony will resume this morning before Judge Steve P. Leskinen.