Florida doctor mixed opioids, teen girls: 'You could clearly just tell she was underage'

This is part two of three. This report about a Florida doctor, Monster on the Beach, deals with sensitive issues of violence, opioid addiction and sexual abuse. Take care if you are triggered by any of these topics. Call 2-1-1 Brevard for help if you need counseling.

In the fall of 2008, a 17-year-old girl went with her dad to visit his doctor in Indialantic. That doctor was John Gayden.

For the teen, it meant a full day out of the Orlando home for girls that her mother had placed her in since she also had a court appearance that day stemming from a juvenile drug charge.

Her dad was seeing Dr. Gayden for a back injury. A short while later he called his daughter into the examination room to meet the doctor.

Dr. Gayden told her she was beautiful and asked her if she would call him. When the girl refused, Dr. Gayden gave her $200 to buy a phone so she could call him. Her father sat there laughing, the teen recounted during a sworn deposition. FLORIDA TODAY is not identifying the teen.

Later the teen's dad would encourage his 17-year-old daughter to call his 55-year-old doctor.

She did. They had lunch the following day and then a few days after that she checked herself out of Covenant House in Orlando and walked down to a 7-11 where Dr. Gayden was waiting for her in the parking lot. According to her deposition, they went to a hotel where she spent the night drinking Grey Goose, taking Xanax and having sex with the doctor.

A year later, the teen, who did not have a driver's license, was arrested again while driving recklessly. Her passenger, Dr. Gayden, had prescription narcotics on him at the time.

It wasn’t the first time the doctor found himself in that situation.

Control through addiction

Around that same time, Dr. Gayden was pulled over for a traffic infraction. He had two teenaged girls in the two-seater car with him. His briefcase was filled with loose pills. Dr. Gayden identified himself as a physician and said the pills were samples.

“There wasn’t a whole lot that we could do with it,” recalled Indialantic Police Chief Mike Connor, who was a detective at the time. “But I remembered it being a lot of pills."

“Yeah, there was definitely information that he had an interest in younger females and that was always something that came up,” said Special Agent Jason Kriegsman with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “He would prescribe younger females prescription pain pills and get them hooked on them. And then it was kind of like a way he could control them.”

Around the same time period, another of his victims was loitering outside the Sunoco, adjacent to Dr. Gayden’s office on State Road A1A. She saw the doctor and asked him for 75 cents to buy something inside the small convenience store. He gave her $100 and told her to buy a phone.

She used the money to buy marijuana. Dr. Gayden saw her again shortly afterward and asked if she had purchased the phone. When she replied "no," he drove her to the Metro PCS store and purchased a Blackberry for her.

They began texting and while she was still 17 years old, the girl told police that Dr. Gayden took her to a fancy dinner in Cocoa Beach, where she had a salad and was thrilled to be able to drink wine at a restaurant. He then brought her to his home where he provided her with two painkillers that she said she crushed and snorted before they had sex.

They carried on a relationship that continued after the girl turned 18.

There were others. According to court documents and police reports, Dr. Gayden rented out blocks of hotel rooms across the street from his office for weeks and even months at a time where several underage girls stayed. Many times the girls would pass out after taking Oxycodone and then wake up naked in the doctor’s bed, according to statements made by one of his victims to FLORIDA TODAY.

Gemma Soto who worked as a waitress at an upscale beachside restaurant remembered Dr. Gayden coming in once or twice a month with an underage companion. He always ordered alcohol for her but the restaurant would refuse for fear of losing its liquor license because of the girl’s age.

“You could clearly just tell she was underage, I mean, she literally looked like a teenage girl going to homecoming,” Soto told FLORIDA TODAY. “Plus, she was a mess. I mean falling over asleep in her soup.”

Carrie Martin lived in the neighborhood behind Dr. Gayden’s practice on SR A1A.

“Stories started surfacing of Gayden preying on teenaged girls who were drug addicts and using them, keeping them for himself to use as however he pleased in trade for drugs. And these were young beautiful girls we would see walking up and down A1A, looking ragged like they were having a really terrible time.”

Tyler Kelsey was good friends with one of those girls whom he said eventually started trading her body to Dr. Gayden for the highly addictive narcotics. According to police reports, she then started introducing her friends to Gayden as well.

All those girls ended up with pills.

Multiple teen girls refuse to testify against the doctor

The police arrested Dr. Gayden after a traffic stop when drugs were found in the car in 2009. They re-arrested him a few weeks later when the 16-year-old passenger told police that she and the doctor had a sexual relationship.

Those charges were eventually dropped when the girl declined to testify, something that frustrated FDLE Agent Jason Kriegsman.

“There's multiple girls that we've interviewed in the investigation that basically said they had sexual activity with him as a minor,” Kriegsman said. “But not all of them would really come forward as far as wanting to give a formal statement. They were telling us, but they didn't want to be a witness.”

Dr. Gayden was making significant money. His pill mill allowed him to own several properties, including the building where his practice was, a townhouse in Indian Harbor Beach, a million-dollar condo in Winter Park all purchased as he prescribed roughly 20,000 opioid pills every week.

And, like in the case of Korrianne Lundstrom, many of those pills ended up being sold on the street for $1 per milligram.

At the height of his practice, Gayden was pulling in $50,000 a week – in cash. His prescription pad was a printing press spewing out $100 bills.

Florida became the Oxycontin Express

If police knew what was going on, why was he allowed to continue to practice for basically five full years between 2006 and 2011?

One of the reasons was a lack of legislation.

There was nothing legally the police could do regarding his prescriptions. It is very difficult to prove that a patient seeking pain medication doesn’t really need it. It’s also very difficult, according to federal prosecutor Dana Hill, to prosecute a doctor.

“Citizens and jurors generally trust doctors and pharmacists and nurses and people who provide healthcare to us. And for that reason, if we're going to prosecute somebody, we generally want to be in a position where we are more trusted than the defendants are,” Hill said adding that another challenge is having to prosecute a doctor for what they know best. “We're not saying this doctor cheated on his taxes or stole money for someone, we're saying what this doctor was doing was not medicine.”

Also, it’s important to note that Dr. Gayden was not the only one. During this time period, Florida earned a reputation of being the place to come if you needed pills. Between 2000 and 2010, Florida became known as the Oxycontin Express because the state’s weak laws and absence of regulation when it came to opioid painkillers attracted dealers and addicts from out of state.

According to a report from the Florida Attorney General’s Office, in 2010 Florida had 900 unregulated pain clinics and was home to 98 of the 100 doctors prescribing the largest quantities of Oxycodone, or “Blues,” in the country.

It would take a lucky break to bring down Dr. Gayden.

Up Next: She meant to die; instead she helped bring down the doctor who prescribed her pain pills, Part 3

Contact Torres at jtorres@floridatoday.com. You can follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @johnalbertorres or on Facebook at facebook.com/FTjohntorres.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Florida opioid Dr. John Gayden controlled teen girls through addiction