LI drug overdose victim's family testifies at pain doctor's trial

The mother and daughter of a Queens man who died of a drug overdose in 2010 tearfully testified Thursday that he looked like a strung-out mess when he got his last prescription from Dr. Stan Li, the pain doctor who also approved pills for Medford pharmacy killer David Laffer.

"He looked awful," said Ann Kingsley, the mother of Kevin Kingsley, appearing at Li's manslaughter and endangerment trial in state court in Manhattan. "He just wasn't Kevin at all. He looked like a derelict -- raggedy, disheveled, like he hadn't showered in days."

The mother said she drove Kingsley, a lifelong drug abuser, to see Li the day after his wife died, when he begged for pills to "get through this" and money to pay Li. Despite his desperate look, she said, he exited in just 15 minutes with a set of new prescriptions.

But a couple of days later, Kevin Kingsley's daughter Erin Markevitch testified, her father was completely zonked -- wearing dirty jeans and a T-shirt to her mother's funeral, nearly nodding off, and then nearly keeling over at the burial. "We threw roses in," she said. "We were afraid he was going to fall in. He couldn't even stand up."

Li, 60, of Hamilton, N.J., who ran a Queens pain clinic, is accused of improperly prescribing painkillers to 20 patients. He faces manslaughter charges for causing the death of two men, reckless endangerment charges involving Kingsley and six others and illegally selling prescriptions to Laffer and others, prosecutors say.

Kingsley, an electrician who complained of back pain and stomach pain from a gastric bypass, died at 53 of an overdose two months after his wife died. Li is not accused of causing the death, but Kingsley is one of seven Li patients named in the case who died of overdoses.

Prosecutors say Li knew about Kingsley's history of substance abuse, but ignored demeanor and other warning signs out of pure greed -- drawing patients to his one-day-a-week clinic from more than 50 miles away, including more than 400 from Long Island.

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The defense contends that Li was simply trying to help people relieve pain. On cross-examination, Kingsley's mother admitted it was hard to know whether to believe her son when he claimed he needed medicine to relieve pain.

"Sometimes I did," she testified, "and sometimes I didn't."

The trial resumes April 21.