(Onawa) A former Iowa nurse from western Iowa, who stole pain medication from nursing home residents, burglarized multiple residences, possessed a firearm as a felon, and committed a bank fraud, was sentenced on July 16, 2025, to more than three years in federal prison. Sarah Ann Haptonstall, age 47, from Onawa, Iowa, received the prison term after she pled guilty on February 24, 2025, to one count of acquiring and attempting to acquire a controlled substance by misrepresentation, fraud, deception, or subterfuge, one count of possession of a firearm by a felon, and one count of bank fraud.
In a plea agreement, and at her plea and sentencing hearings, Haptonstall admitted that, in March 2023, she burglarized an Onawa couple’s home on multiple occasions in order to steal narcotic pain medication. One the residents needed the medication for constant nerve pain. Haptonstall knew this, because when she was a nurse in 2021, she had delivered narcotics to the Onawa couple’s residence. When law enforcement officers arrested Haptonstall on March 10, 2023, after she re-burglarized the Onawa couple’s residence a final time, Haptonstall possessed a 9mm Luger pistol in her truck. Haptonstall was a felon and drug user at the time, and so it was illegal for her to possess firearms. Haptonstall had purchased two 9mm Luger pistols in February 2020, after falsely stating that she was not an unlawful user of, or addicted to, a controlled substance.
The burglaries of the Onawa couple’s home were but one part of a larger drug diversion scheme that Haptonstall was perpetrating in western Iowa. In February and March 2023, Haptonstall was entering multiple apartments in Onawa and stealing the residents’ pain medications. Further, between April and October 2022, while working as a licensed Iowa nurse, defendant stole hydrocodone pills from four elderly residents of an Onawa nursing home and a Sergeant Bluff nursing home. One of the victims was over 90 years old. Haptonstall removed the narcotics from pill cards and replaced them with Tylenol. One of the nursing home residents suffered from severe pain as she died because defendant had swapped out the victim’s narcotic pills for Tylenol and made a false entry in her medical record. Another resident was in hospice when defendant stole her narcotics. Haptonstall was first licensed as a nurse in 2006, and her license was renewed at least five times (in 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2021). Haptonstall ultimately surrendered her nursing license.
Haptonstall also admitted that, in early 2023, she committed a bank fraud against a small family-owned business in Onawa. Haptonstall was the business’s bookkeeper and abused her position of trust to embezzle over $8,000 from the company. Specifically, Haptonstall created fraudulent checks payable to herself, drawn on the small business’s account, and bearing one of its proprietor’s signatures. Haptonstall disguised the fraudulent checks by making false and fictitious entries in the small business’s electronic bookkeeping system.
Haptonstall has an extensive criminal history, beginning with six theft convictions in the late 1990s and 2000s. Between 1997 and 2013, a state court dismissed more than 30 additional theft charges against Haptonstall after she agreed to pay restitution to the victims in those cases. Haptonstall’s felony record started in 2006, when she pled guilty to forgery after she forged signatures on checks. In 2014, Haptonstall was convicted of a felony controlled substance violation after making a material misrepresentation to obtain hydrocodone from a grocery store. In February 2023, while she was committing bank fraud, and about a month before burglarizing residences in Onawa, Haptonstall received a ten-year, fully suspended prison sentence in state court for felony drug diversion after she admitted she had swapped patients’ hydrocodone for Tylenol pills while working as a delivery driver for a local pharmacy.
Haptonstall was sentenced in Sioux City by United States District Court Judge Leonard T. Strand. Haptonstall was sentenced to 42 months’ imprisonment. She was also ordered to make over $8,000 in restitution to her former employer and to repay $5,000 in court-appointed attorney fees. Haptonstall must also serve a three-year term of supervised release after the prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.
Haptonstall was released on the bond previously set and is to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons on a date yet to be set. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Timothy L. Vavricek and investigated by the Iowa Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and Monona County Sheriff’s Office assisted the investigation.
