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PITTSBURGH (AFX) - Several women who were drugged and then sexually assaulted and photographed by a former drug store manager sued him and his former employer for $18 million.
The lawsuit filed by six of the seven women assaulted by Donald E. Preik Jr. accuses Rite Aid Corp. of negligence and recklessness for not supervising Preik and for providing him access to prescription drugs, including the "date-rape" drug triazolam and other tranquilizers.
Preik, 49, is serving a 20- to 64-year state prison sentence for drugging and sexually assaulting the women, attacks that he photographed and, in one case, videotaped.
Preik was sentenced in June after pleading guilty in August 2005 to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, drug possession and invasion of privacy. A judge also declared him a sexually violent predator under the state's Megan's Law.
Preik stole sleeping pills and other drugs from the Rite Aid store in Clairton, where he was manager, prosecutors said. The assaults began in 1999, but the women did not know they had been assaulted until March 2004, when one of them found a photo album containing pictures of an assault.
The lawsuit, filed last week in Allegheny County court, alleges that Rite Aid gave Preik a key to the store's pharmacy, thereby allowing him to access the drugs.
"These are controlled substances that only a pharmacist is allowed access to," said Richard Sandow, the women's attorney.
Rite Aid spokeswoman Jody Cook said the company did nothing wrong.
"The store manager committed a criminal act of which he pleaded guilty and went to jail," Cook said. "The actions of this manager were outside the scope of his employment and it involved his live-in girlfriend of 18 years and her immediate family."
But the lawsuit alleges that Preik had a discipline problem at the store and that Rite Aid did nothing about $80,000 in merchandise that went missing.
After Preik's arrest, an audit by the Drug Enforcement Agony "found a dramatic loss of inventory" at the store, the lawsuit states.
"However, in spite of the dramatic loss of product, Mr. Preik's access to controlled substances was never questioned and Rite Aid never properly inventoried the controlled substances to determine if a loss occurred," the lawsuit states.
The women accuse Rite Aid of failing to institute "even the minimum of proper security measures to present non-pharmacists access to controlled substances," according to their lawsuit.
The seventh victim sued Preik and Rite Aid separately in 2005. Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be
Copyright 2007 AFX News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
