4-Year Sentence For 'Pain Management' Doctor In Patient's Overdose Death

SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA – A former doctor from Mountain View has been sentenced to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in a case involving a 29-year-old man who died as a result of a drug interaction in January 2012.

Jasna Mrdjen, 74, ran a pain management clinic in Los Gatos where Santa Clara County prosecutors say she was writing excessive prescriptions for Oxycodone and Percocet to patients with minimal evaluation and sometimes without prior medical records.

Investigators from multiple law enforcement agencies began looking into her clinic in 2011 after one of Mrdjen's patients was caught selling the drugs she had prescribed.

During the course of one investigation she prescribed drugs to an undercover officer posing as a patient with foot pain without ever removing her shoe to examine the affected foot, prosecutors said.

Mrdjen prescribed Oxycodone, Flexeril and Clonazepam to Steven English, 29, on January 3, 2012 - just after he'd returned from a drug treatment rehabilitation program. Two weeks later English was found dead at
his parents' home in Truckee and the official cause of death was determined to be multiple drug ingestion.

Mrdjen later altered English's file and forged English's signature, according to prosecutors.

On Sept. 26, 2016, she pleaded no contest to nine counts of prescribing a controlled substance without a legitimate purpose, two counts of dispensing a controlled substance to an addict, one count of conspiracy
and one count of involuntary manslaughter.

The case was investigated by the Santa Clara County Specialized Enforcement Team, the Medical Board of California, the state Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Mountain View and Los
Gatos/Monte Sereno police departments.

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