Dr. Lawrence Francis Chenier III violated more than 30 years of trust and friendship by passing false prescriptions through Battlefield Discount Drugs, pharmacy owner John Storey testified Wednesday.

Storey’s testimony, which was to continue this morning, was at the center of the second full day of Chenier’s trial for 73 counts of prescription forgery and a single count of conspiracy.

“It was like it was from the burning bush,” Storey said of his trust in Chenier.

Storey, whose father was a doctor in Madison Parish, said he first met Chenier when he was a teenager and mowed the grass at the hospital where Chenier and his father practiced.

“I have put a profound amount of trust in him through the years,” Storey said.

He said he and other employees became suspicious of Chenier’s co-defendant Pattie Carr after she had picked up thousands of pills under various names at Storey’s pharmacy. Yet for each prescription, Carr and Chenier had a seemingly valid excuse.

“What outweighed our suspicions was the voice of Dr. Chenier or his handwriting,” Storey said.

On Aug. 22, 2011, Storey said, he finally had enough of the excuses and felt something was really wrong.

“I think what contributed to the fact that I didn’t catch on sooner than I did is most of the patients had similar names. There were lots of Smiths and lots of Jones’,” Storey said. “They had to be real. He was seeing them in multiple locations and writing their names down and verifying them.”

Narcotics agents raided the couple’s home at 100 Colonial Drive in September 2011. More than 300 empty pill bottles written to a number of names were found in the home.

Evidence introduced by prosecutors shows that prescription pads from Chenier’s clinic and Madison Parish Hospital were used in the forgeries.

Heather Smith, director of medical records for Madison Parish Hospital, said only two of the more than 20 names used on the prescriptions were active patients at the hospital.

“There were a few records from the early ‘90s with some of those names,” Smith said.

During Storey’s cross-examination, defense attorney Marshall Sanders insisted that hydrocodone became a more closely controlled drug in July 2011 and that Storey had violated DEA regulations.

He presented a copy of a federal law he said was passed and went into effect in 2011 moving hydrocodone from schedule III to schedule II, thus increasing regulations. However, the DEA did not make its final rule rescheduling hydrocodone until Aug. 22, 2014, according to the DEA’s office of Diversion Control.

The change in schedule did not go into effect until earlier this month.

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. None of these prescriptions, not one of them is a schedule II drug,” Storey said.

Other schedule II drugs include cocaine and methamphetamine.

The false assertion by Sanders could damage the defense case, which has relied strongly on discrediting Storey and Carr.

Carr is expected to testify, but on Wednesday jurors saw two videotaped statements she gave to Warren County investigator Chris Satcher and DEA Agent Kim Dearman during a continuation of Dearman’s testimony.

In both tapes, Carr insists Chenier was not part of her prescription forgery plot, yet admits he wrote the prescriptions.

“He did not know anything about it,” she said before admitting that Chenier wrote the prescriptions and told her not to continue to go back to Battlefield Discount Drugs. “I did not listen to him. I did it anyway.”

Trial resumed at 9 a.m. today with continuation of Storey’s testimony.