Dr. Farid Fata (Photo from his website)
Heart-wrenching scenes willmunfold this coming week in the downtown Detroit courtroom of U.S. District Judge Paul Borman.
About two dozen family members of victims will give statements at a sentencing hearing, starting Monday morning, about the horrors related to Dr. Farid Fata, the 50-year-old oncologist who bilked Medicare and gave unnecessary treatments -- including chemotherapy. Some patients didn't even have cancer.
The hearing is expected to run through the week. It would be surprising if he were sentenced to less than life or a large number of years essentially equivalent to life.
The hearing also is the topic of a NBC News story Sunday.
One of those folks expected to talk will be Geraldine Parkin, Laura Berman of The Detroit News reports:
"For me, I want the pleasure of looking him in the eye," says Parkin, who says her husband, Tim Parkin, is largely disabled as a result of his treatment.
Fata once looked into her eyes and those of her adult children, insisting that her husband needed chemotherapy. Now she is ready to respond.
"I want to say to him, 'You gave us a life of the unknown, of misery, and now you're going to have a life behind bars.' "
About 150 victims filed victim impact statements, Berman writes. The doctor was arrested two years ago. He pleaded guilty to 16 counts of fraud last September.
In this case, though, some of Fata's patients were given chemotherapy treatments, some for years, after false or inflated cancer diagnoses by Fata. Many others were treated, and billed for, drugs on schedules designed for profitability rather than therapeutic value. The government has estimated there are at leat 550 people who were victimized by the doctor.
"Whether they were cancer or non-cancer patients, solid tumor or liquid, Fata did not discriminate: his ultimate goal was to maximize his profit on the backs of his patients," federal prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum.
