After a week of deliberations, a Manhattan jury found a greedy Queens doctor guilty of manslaughter in the overdose deaths of two patients for whom he’d recklessly prescribed painkillers.
Dr. Stan Xuhui Li, 60, showed no emotion as jurors convicted him Friday of 200 of the whopping 211 counts against him for running a shady pain management clinic.
After the verdict was handed down, Justice Michael Sonenberg ordered the dope doc to be cuffed and taken into custody. No more than a half hour earlier, he ate a leisurely takeout lunch of stir fried steak and green peppers in a park near the court building.
The former New Jersey anesthesiologist prescribed and sold highly addictive meds out of his basement office in Flushing, Queens.
Li peddled narcotics including Oxycodone, Oxycontin and the anti-anxiety med Xanax to as many as 100 patients a day, prosecutors said during the three-month trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Two of Li’s patients — Joseph Haeg and Nicholas Rappold — overdosed on a lethal combination of Xanax and Oxycodone in 2009 and 2010, respectively.
Two of the pill pusher’s other patients also fatally overdosed. He was found guilty for reckless endangerment for their deaths.
Li’s clinic even treated drug-addled killer David Laffer, who slaughtered four people in 2011 when he held up a Long Island pharmacy for pain pills.
The sleazy doctor pocketed $ 450,000 in cash over a two-year period and had $ 1.2 million in his bank account when authorities began investigating him.
“This is a case about a doctor who put money before lives,” Assistant District Attorney Charlotte Fishman told jurors in opening statements. “We will prove he exploited addictions … in pursuit of the almighty dollar.”
Fishman said Li regularly prescribed his patients huge doses of pain meds despite knowing that many were addicts and dealers.
Defense lawyer Raymond Belair said that simply wasn’t true.
“He was a careful, caring physician,” he said. “There was no way he could have known if a patient was doctor-shopping or exceeded prescription limits.”
Li faces 5-to-15 year behind bars on each of the top two counts of manslaughter. He’ll likely face additional prison time for reckless endangerment, falsifying business records and other charges.
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