CINCINNATI (WKRC) - A Hamilton County man is accused of posing as a nurse and working at two home health agencies.
Authorities say Martez Morris went undetected for four years. He was indicted on Thursday.
The 27-year-old from Clifton faces decades behind bars.
He would take his patients to their appointments at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Liberty Township and to the hospital's main campus, where he claimed to be an intern.
Parents and employers said everyone at the hospital seemed to know him.
The state attorney general early on Thursday morning had the Franklin County Sheriff arrest Morris. His grand jury indictment shows charges of endangering children, impersonating a nurse, Medicaid fraud, identity fraud and several other charges.
It states from September 2015 all the way through just a couple of weeks ago, he administered care to patients claiming he was a licensed nurse.
“I see his notes. His nursing notes,” says Sylvie Wamba, from Target Home Healthcare in Springdale. “He writes like a nurse, he does the job of a nurse, and he was taking care of the babies like a nurse. So I had no clue — none.”
Target employed Morris up until two weeks ago when investigators came knocking.
Wamba showed them all his documentation including the name he gave for his licensing verification. She showed us on the Ohio Board of Nursing verification site the name he gave.
“It says Morris, Caitlin M. I thought the ‘M’ was for Martez. He said Kaitlyn was his middle name and they switched it.”
Wamba says Morris had a driver’s license that showed his middle name was Caitlin. She described the kinds of care he administered without a single complaint from patients.
“One of the patients he took care of had a ventilator machine to help them breathe and one of the other child he was taken care of only had the G-tube which helped him eat because they can’t really swallow. So, he would take care of feeding them through the G-tube, giving the medication to the G-tube and he was very successful at it.”
And he may have become skilled at some of those duties while working at Loving Care Transitional in Butler county, where he worked on and off for two years.
“To be able to assign this nurse to a patient that would require a procedure to be done,” said Regina Bobie, Loving Care’s owner. “We would train you how to do those procedures well.”
Bobie says Morris was a good student. He passed all of the background checks and he presented that driver’s license that showed he was Kaitlyn Martez Morris.
Bobie said about a year ago one of the patients complained to Medicaid that Morris was late several times to appointments.
That is apparently when Medicaid, through its own investigation, alerted the attorney general’s office.
Exactly how many patients Morris cared for over the past four years is unknown, but it does not appear any patients received substandard care leading to any detrimental health issues.
A Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center spokesperson tells Local 12 News Martez Morris was never an intern or an employee. Morris had no affiliation with any of the hospital’s branches.
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