A man is facing two years in prison after pleading guilty to sending a threatening email to a medical resort back in 2005. Andrew Burroughs, a 30-year-old Lompoc man, decided to blackmail the Catholic Healthcare West, the parent company of Saint John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. Three years before that, the defendant had helped with the disinfection of the medical center, when he was an employee of an environmental company.
Saint John's hospital was facing a mold infestation, which could have had serious consequences on the patients' health. Although the institution employed a specialized company to get rid of the problem, it chose not to disclose detailed information to the public, in order to avoid spreading panic. The man, on his part, decided to be one step ahead of the game and claimed that he would publish the pictures taken at the hospital, thus disclosing confidential information about the case. To prevent him from doing that, the Catholic Healthcare West was coerced into paying Burroughs $500,000.
Apparently, at the time the defendant was making his demand, the situation at the hospital was already under control, so the staff alerted the federal authorities. “The hospital had been working for years with both county and state regulators to remediate and abate the problem,” stated Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph O. Johns for the
Ventura County Star. "It doesn't seem to be a very good extortion plan to seek money for threatening to hold back information that the community is already aware of.”
Burroughs' lawyer herself admitted that the decision to extort a medical institution, especially after the very object of the blackmail had already disappeared, was not the brightest of ideas. However, since her client's demands were not valid in the first place, she claimed that he shouldn't have been brought in front of a federal court. Although the maximum penalty for the crime committed via technological means is of two years, the guilty plea may reduce incarceration time to only 10 months.
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