Barry Cadden, Massachusetts man at center of deadly meningitis outbreak, pleads no contest to manslaughter in Michigan
LANSING, Michigan - Barry Cadden, the Massachusetts man at the center of a deadly national meningitis outbreak back in 2012, has pleaded no contest to 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter in Michigan.
Cadden was the co-founder and former owner of the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, which distributed steroids used mostly for back pain that were contaminated by mold.
More than 100 people across the country died, investigators said, and nearly 800 ended up sick. It eventually became the focus of a CBS News "60 Minutes" investigation in 2013.
Cadden pleaded no contest to 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter in Michigan Monday in deaths of 11 people there in the 2012 outbreak. He will face 10-to-15 years in prison at his sentencing in April.
He's currently serving 14-and-a-half years in prison on federal racketeering and fraud convictions.
The Michigan sentence will be served concurrently - at the same time - as the federal sentence.
NECC was eventually shut down. It was only supposed to be compounding drugs for individual patients with prescriptions, but instead they were illegally manufacturing on a massive scale without FDA approval.