South Carolina's attorney general has charged a Bishopville nurse with stealing prescription pain medication from five nursing home residents over nearly three months. Joanne Claus, 70, worked as a licensed practical nurse at Karesh Long Term Care and Rehab in Camden when investigators say she used deception to obtain the residents’ hydrocodone/acetaminophen, a Schedule II controlled substance, for herself.
What investigators allege
The case was built by the Attorney General’s Vulnerable Adults and Medicaid Provider Fraud Unit, working with the South Carolina Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Drug Control. According to their joint investigation, Claus used misrepresentation, fraud, forgery, deception or subterfuge to obtain hydrocodone/acetaminophen belonging to five separate residents of the facility between April 11 and July 1, 2026.
Claus was booked into the Kershaw County Detention Center on Sept. 23, 2026. She faces five counts of exploitation of a vulnerable adult and five counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud — one of each for every resident named in the investigation. Each exploitation count alone carries a potential prison term if she is convicted. She has not entered a plea, and as with anyone facing charges that have not been proven in court, she is presumed innocent unless and until a judge or jury finds otherwise.
Why nursing homes are a specific target of this unit
The Vulnerable Adults and Medicaid Provider Fraud Unit exists specifically because long-term care residents are considered high-risk for this kind of theft: many depend on staff to administer their medication, can’t always track their own doses, and may not be physically or cognitively able to report what’s missing. South Carolina law treats exploitation of a vulnerable adult as a distinct, more serious charge than ordinary theft for exactly that reason — the victim’s dependence on the person doing the stealing is part of what the law is punishing, on top of the separate drug charge for how the medication itself was obtained.
Neither Karesh Long Term Care and Rehab nor Claus has publicly commented on the specific allegations. The investigation is continuing, and the Attorney General’s office has not said whether additional charges are possible if more residents come forward.
Diversion cases like this one get written up as “a nurse stole drugs,” and that framing skips past the part that should actually worry the rest of us: if the allegations are proven, five residents, each one presumably still getting a med pass that looked normal on paper, went without pain control they were prescribed for weeks at a time. Narcotic counts and waste documentation exist to catch exactly this. The question every long-term care facility should be asking after a case like this one is whether its own count-and-waste process would have caught the pattern on its own, or whether it took a state investigation to find out five residents in a row came up short.
What comes next
Claus’s case now moves through the Kershaw County court system, where a first appearance typically sets bond and a future court date. If convicted on the drug charges, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud is itself a felony under South Carolina law with the potential for years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines per count — on top of whatever penalty attaches to the five separate exploitation counts. The South Carolina Board of Nursing can also act independently of the criminal case, opening its own investigation into whether Claus’s LPN license should be suspended or revoked regardless of how the criminal charges are ultimately resolved.