ALVIN!
Sorry, chipmunks: Alvin Mingczech Yee, the 44-year-old Mission Viejo physician who prescribed prescription painkillers to young people he often met at Starbucks–leading to the overdose deaths of at least two “patients”–has been sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison.
]
We'd reported in April that a plea deal was being cooked up:
That piece revealed at least one who Yee prescribed drugs had died, but the sentencing documents state there were two.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford sentenced Yee Thursday to 135 months in prison, according to Thom Mrozek of the U.S. Attorney's Office, which had recommended a 121-month sentence.
Yee was originally arrested at a Starbucks where he met undercover agents posing as patients. He pleaded guilty in April to seven counts of illegal distribution of a controlled substance by a practitioner–the drugs including oxycodone and alprazolam.
The case folds into what's been identified as a prescription drug overdose epidemic among young people in South County:
Behind the Orange Curtain and the OC OD Tsunami
Email:
mc****@oc******.com
. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.