BURLINGTON — A nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction has pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing drugs prescribed to patients and consuming them herself over a roughly eight-month period last year.
Kimberly Cotto, 65, an Enfield resident, was charged by the government in May with two counts of diverting drugs from psychiatric ward patients and tampering with the medications to conceal her use of them.
The two counts carry a potential prison sentence of up to 14 years.
From March 2025 through November 2025, Cotto admitted, she diverted “controlled substances prescribed to her patients for her own use while she was employed as a nurse at the White River Junction Veterans Affairs Center,” according to her plea agreement.
Cotto diverted controlled substances “in a variety of ways,” the plea agreement states.
Count one states she removed amphetamine/dextroamphetamine from capsules she separated in half and then administered “the empty and nearly empty capsules” to patients with “reckless disregard for the risk that another person would be placed in danger of death or bodily injury.”
The plea agreement cited one victim, a patient in the psychiatric ward, as an example of the effects of the missing medication.
“Victim 1 both experienced hearing more voices and engaged in uncontrolled behavior on two occasions,” the agreement states.
To conceal her consumption of the drugs she had diverted from patients, Cotto replaced the tablets with hydroxyzine, an antihistamine.
According to the second count, Cotto “knowingly and intentionally acquired amphetamine/dextroamphetamine and methylphenidate, both Schedule II controlled substances, by misrepresentation, fraud, deception and subterfuge.”
Cotto’s plea agreement stipulates she is forfeiting her nursing license issued by the state of New Hampshire.
The VA Medical Center and the New Hampshire Board of Nursing did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Valley News. Efforts to reach Cotto and her defense attorney, Murdoch Walker II, of Atlanta, Ga., were not immediately successful.
On June 26, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered conditions of release for Cotto while she awaited sentencing, prohibiting her from possessing or consuming drugs or alcohol and requiring her to submit to drug testing if deemed necessary by pretrial services.
Cotto’s sentencing hearing is scheduled Oct. 23 at 10 a.m. in U.S. District Court in Burlington.
