EVANS CITY — The defense in a case against a former nurse accused of stealing medication from her patients argued discrepancies in medication logs suggest a reporting error instead of stolen medicine.

Rebecca Jo McCartney, 57, of Evans City, is accused of stealing medication from three patients and falsifying medical charts while working in 2023 and 2024 as an licensed practical nurse at The Grove at Harmony, which is now Kadima Rehabilitation & Nursing at Harmony in Jackson Township. McCartney pleaded not guilty at Wednesday’s preliminary hearing before District Judge Amy Marcinkiewicz.

Two felony charges against McCartney were amended from acquiring controlled substances to criminal attempt to acquire controlled substances. Three misdemeanor counts of care-dependent person abuse and one misdemeanor count of furnishing false material information were also held for court.

Assistant district attorney David Beichner called upon two of McCartney’s former coworkers to testify and entered three medication logs into evidence that show the dates and times medicine drawers on the nurse cart were accessed.

Tiffany Jucha, a registered nurse who previously worked with McCartney at the facility, testified she was alerted to the incident when one of McCartney’s patients requested a Percocet. The opiate can be distributed to patients as needed for pain in the facility.

Jucha said she attempted to dispense the medicine from the nurse cart, but the computer system denied the request saying Percocet had already been dispensed for the patient within the last eight hours.

Jucha said the patient had not requested or received the medication before asking her. She testified the patient was cognitively alert enough to know what their pills looked like and if they were received.

Jucha took the complaint to director of nursing, Chelsea Buchanan, who testified she was the assistant director when she received a total of three complaints from McCartney’s patients on Oct. 16 about not receiving prescribed opiates.

Buchanan explained the nurses pull medications from narcotic and non-narcotic drawers on the nurse cart in the hallways outside the patient rooms. She said the cart’s computer logs the date, time and patient for which a nurse withdraws medications. The cart is also in view of the hallway camera.

Nurses are trained to fill out a separate paper log on the cart when dispensing medication, but nurses don’t always follow procedure and will fill in the time later, Buchanan said. She testified McCartney admitted she filled out the times later instead of when the medication was dispensed.

Buchanan also testified she reviewed camera footage for McCartney’s entire shifts from Oct. 3 to 18 and witnessed one incident where McCartney said she had visited a patient’s room twice for medication but was only seen once on camera, and another incident where the time the drawer was accessed was not consistent with medications given.

Defense attorney Kenneth Harris Jr. said the discrepancies in the medication logs show the proper procedure was not followed, but not that medicine was stolen. He said because only McCartney’s records were pulled, the court can’t determine if other nurses operate similarly.

McCartney and her patients also were not drug tested or searched for the missing medications, Harris said. Harris argued the state’s case is largely based on the word of patients whose cognitive ability can be questioned.

McCartney’s formal arraignment is scheduled at 1 p.m. May 27 in Butler County Common Pleas Courtroom 5.