Former Rockville Centre physician sentenced for causing 5 overdose deaths

A former Rockville Centre physician was sentenced Monday in Nassau County Court to up to 15 years in prison for causing the fatal overdoses of five patients by illegally prescribing them powerful opioids.

Nassau County prosecutors said George Blatti, 78, wrote prescriptions for the five patients between 2016 and 2018. From 2014 to 2019, according to prosecutors, he wrote prescriptions for more than 1.8 million units of opioids, selling the scripts from his car and a makeshift office in a shuttered Radio Shack. 

“Doctors are supposed to treat patients with compassion and care and love,” Judge Francis Ricigliano said. “You did the opposite of that. What you did to these poor people was horrible.”

In a statement she read aloud to the court, Lisa Quigley, sister of Sean Quigley, a 31-year-old volunteer firefighter from Floral Park who was one of the victims, said Blatti had chosen “financial gain and profit over human life.”

Blatti, she said, had stolen what was irreplaceable. Her brother would never watch her get married, never meet nieces and nephews.

The sister of victim Geraldine Sabatasso, 50, recounted the moment when she watched authorities carry Sabatasso out of her bedroom in a body bag. She hadn’t been allowed into the room because it was a crime scene, the sister told the court.

Valerie Kinzer, widow of Michael Kinzer, 44, an electrician from Valley Stream, said in a statement read by a relative that the couple’s twin boys would never again be tucked in by their father.

“Our world has forever changed," she said.

Blatti, a doctor since 1976 who surrendered his medical license in 2019, pleaded guilty in October to five counts of second-degree manslaughter. Under the sentence handed down Monday, he will be eligible for parole after serving 5 years.

He had originally faced second-degree murder charges in what the DEA said was the first time in New York State a doctor had been charged under the theory of a defendant acting with depraved indifference to human life. Ricigliano, in 2022, rejected that theory.

Prosecutors and the DEA have identified Blatti’s other victims as Robert Mielinis, 55, and Diane Woodring, 53, of Port Washington.

Most had come to Blatti seeking treatment for pain, Assistant District Attorney Stefanie Palma said Monday.

“They were vulnerable,” she told the court. “They trusted him … and he killed them.”

One of the most heavily prescribed patients was Woodring, according to the DEA. Over four years and one month of treatment, Blatti prescribed her 18,060 pills. She died in 2018 of acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of oxycodone, alprazolam, mirtazapine and valproic acid.

The latest published New York State Department of Health opioid statistics put the number of overdose deaths at 40 in Suffolk County in 2021, and 25 in Nassau County.

Jeffrey Reynolds, a substance abuse expert and president and chief executive of Family & Children's Association in Garden City, said that state laws creating electronic prescription databases, combined with scrutiny by public health and law enforcement officials, had made overprescribing less likely than in the past, though it likely still occurs.

“Some of these folks wind up doing it because they've got their own set of problems, and some are doing it for the money,” he said. But “the fact that you wear a white coat doesn't give you a pass. It simply makes you a drug dealer in a different way.”