Pain Clinic Raids - Florida

Three South Florida pain clinics were raided by Federal narcotics agents last week. They were suspected of sending painkillers along black-market pipelines to Kentucky and other Appalachian states.

American Pain - Lake Worth, Executive Pain and East Coast Pain Clinic - West Palm Beach watched as agents of the DEA, and sheriff's offices carted way boxes of records after serving the clinics with search warrants.

All three clinics are owned and operated by Christopher and Jeffery George - 29 year-old twin brothers with criminal records. The brothers were highlighted in a Miami Herald report for selling painkillers at a pace unseen elsewhere in the country.

The George brothers have been charged with felony levels crimes of theft, selling stolen property, resisting arrest, and possession of illegal substances.

No arrests have been made.

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Work Place Violence

After the fatal shooting in Orlando, FL and the mass murders at Fort Hood in Texas, the issue of workplace violence has America buzzing again.

The Fort Hood incident has received a lot of media coverage already and is one of those terrifying incidents that remind us all that people are unpredictable and that they can be violent. Due to the large-scale terror inflicted by the gunman at Fort Hood, much of the incident in Orlando was under covered by the media.

After one year at an engineering firm in Orlando, Jason Rodriguez was fired for failure to improve performance. Over the next two years, Rodriguez apparently never got over the termination and returned to the job killing one employee and injuring others.

While rare, these types of incidents remind people in our industry of exactly why background checks are down. Not all workplace violence result in death or serious injury, but we should all be aware of the escalation that can occur. Those instances of non-lethal violence such as stalking, threats, intimidation, harassment or property destruction often go unreported. Bullying can escalate and most businesses, at some point, experience some form of work place violence.

Background checks are important for finding out if a person has a past history of violence, but it is important to remember that if somebody has no past, there is really know way of knowing if they are capable of such violence.

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Why do Background Checks?

There was a murderer in a Florida middle school for 3 years, undetected.

Curtis McRae, a 59-year-old school custodian, never tried to hide that he'd served about 15 years behind bars for killing a liquor store manager in the 1970s in a $100 robbery gone wrong. He wrote it on his school district application.

Under Florida law, McRae should have never been hired, but a recent investigation showed that he had inside help, someone pulling strings for him.

Jacqueline Clervan-Harrell "basically circumvented the process for him to come on board," said Darron Davis, Chief of Human Resources. She was also listed as a reference on his application.

Once discovered, McRae was found to have an extensive record, including the murder charges as well as a rape charge. His extensive criminal history ends with a final arrest in 1999.

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