Victim’s sister rips ‘Oxy Doc’
The sister of a Staten Island man who died of a drug overdose two days after visiting a Manhattan physician dubbed the “Oxy Doc” burst into tears on the stand Wednesday as she recalled finding her brother’s body.
“[My son] came in the room and told me to come look at how his uncle was sleeping,” Krystal Benedetto tearfully told jurors during Dr. Martin Tesher’s Brooklyn federal court trial for illegal distribution of controlled substances.
Tesher, 82, is accused of prescribing some 2.2 million oxycodone pills to patients, in addition to other opioids and pain medications, from 2012 to 2017.
She said she found her brother, Nicholas Benedetto, with his “butt in the air” and his face in a pillow on March 5, 2016.
He had left Tesher’s office just two days earlier with a stack of new prescriptions, she testified.
Benedetto, 28, said that she grabbed her phone thinking she’d take a funny and embarrassing photo of her sibling but then realized that his face was purple.
“I got my kids out of the house and called 911,” she told the court, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Benedetto testified she’d previously called the alleged quack’s office to complain after she saw her brother repeatedly leave with prescriptions for drugs.
“I said Nicholas was abusing the drugs and Tesher needs to stop giving them to him,” Benedetto said she told a receptionist.
Tesher’s attorneys have said their client was using his best judgment over the years, given that medical guidelines don’t address pill counts.
If convicted, he could face up to life behind bars. esaul@nypost.com