A Virginia grandmother has been accused of being the primary distributor and sometimes financier of a drug distribution ring that sold more than 20,000 pills of powerful narcotics and left one woman dead.
Donna George sold methadone and OxyContin in front of her “young grandchildren” and cared for her co-conspirator’s children in exchange for pills, according to testimony in court documents. The 46-year-old’s attorney declined to comment.
George is the fourth person to be busted in the ring that authorities say sold more than $500,000 in narcotics between February 2007 and September 2007, court records show. According to prosecutors, even after the three others were arrested, George continued to sell drugs. Authorities say they spotted her dealing as recent as Aug. 25.
Investigators uncovered the ring in September 2007 after arresting George’s daughter Cindy Dutton in Dutton’s Manassas home and charging her with passing fraudulent prescriptions, according to documents filed in Alexandria’s federal court.
Dutton, who was not charged, told officials that she started passing the prescriptions after meeting Lisa Sindelar through her mother, who cared for Sindelar’s children. Sindelar, her husband, Richard, and brother-in-law John, allegedly created the fake prescriptions on computers and then paid others to fill them.
Richard Sindelar also sold the drugs directly, he admitted. According to court documents, he sold OxyContin to Westmoreland County resident Tina Foster at least five times. Foster later died from a OxyContin drug overdose. Lisa and Richard Sindelar were sentenced to five years in prison. John Sindelar was sentenced to nearly two years.
When the Sindelars’ cash ran low, they often turned to George who had cash from her other drug dealings, charging papers said.
But, several informants told authorities, George’s primary role was as a distributor for the Sindelars, documents said. By April 2008, she was the “Sindelars’ main, street-level distributor of pills,” one unnamed informant reportedly said. Another described George as a “big-time” dealer who had buyers consistently arriving at her house which was “well-kept and seemed like a normal home and not like the home of a drug dealer.”
By June 2007, the Sindelars “became very large due to George’s ability to sell their pills through her established drug contacts,” another informant reportedly told authorities.
George was arrested late last month and is being held for being a “serious risk” to the community, a judge ruled.
