Former Santa Rosa physician sentenced to 30 months in prison in drug case

A former Santa Rosa physician was sentenced to 2½ years in prison for distributing controlled substances without legitimate medical need and outside the “scope of his professional practice,” authorities said Thursday.

Thomas McNeese Keller, 75, who ran a pain management practice on Farmers Lane in Santa Rosa, has until Sept. 8, 2023, to turn himself in to start serving the 30-month term, according to a news release from the federal Department of Justice.

Keller was convicted in November on four counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substances, for which he faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The jury in that case could not reach a verdict on six additional counts.

During a trial in federal court, evidence showed that over more than two years, Keller repeatedly prescribed the opioid oxycodone and “other strong, addictive drugs” to a 17-year-old girl who was “struggling with mental health issues” when she came to him as a patient, the news release said. The evidence showed that the dosages and combinations that Keller prescribed “far exceeded the usual course of professional practice and were for no legitimate medical need,” the release said.

Keller also prescribed to the patient the controlled substance diazepam, known as Valium, alongside oxycodone and carisoprodol, a muscle relaxer. The patient, identified only as A.M. in the news release, died in July 2017 of an overdose of oxycodone and other drugs.

Separately from the federal case, Keller was arrested in 2020 and faced multiple charges brought by the California Attorney General’s Office, including second-degree murder in the deaths of four Sonoma County residents: Tripo Nelson, Ashlee McDonald, Dean Rielli and Jerri Lee Badenhop-Bionda. All four died from drug overdoses while under Keller’s care between 2016 and 2017.

In that case, after a nearly two-month trial, Keller was found not guilty in the second-degree murders of Badenhop-Bionda and Rielli, and was also acquitted of recklessly prescribing medications to Steven Delacour of Forestville and an undercover agent who posed as a patient.

The jury in that trial hung on the remaining five counts, including second-degree murder in the deaths of Nelson and McDonald and recklessly prescribing medications to Santa Rosa residents Jennifer Silver and Alyssa Rieden.

The jury also was unable to reach a consensus on the charge of elder abuse for Keller’s treatment of his former patient, Susan Ross — a 67-year-old woman who died in 2015 from respiratory and other health issues in combination with dangerous levels of prescription drugs in her system.

Keller, a former Army neurosurgeon, was found to have engaged in sexual misconduct with several patients in 1989, for which he served six months in jail. He also was temporarily stripped of his license, which was eventually reinstated in 1994.

He opened his Santa Rosa medical practice in 2008 and started focusing on pain management about three years later.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay