A Dallas anesthesiologist faces life in prison after he was found guilty of poisoning IV bags at a surgical center where he worked two years ago, leading to a coworker’s death and serious health problems for many patients, federal prosecutors said.
Raynaldo Ortiz Jr. was convicted on April 12 of 10 charges altogether, including four counts of tampering with consumer products resulting in serious bodily injury, one count of tampering with a consumer product, and five counts of intentionally adulterating a drug.
The 60-year-old Hispanic man faces up to 190 years in prison, but Chief District Judge David Godbey has yet to schedule a date to send Ortiz away for the remainder of his life.
“Dr. Ortiz cloaked himself in the white coat of a healer, but instead of curing pain, he inflicted it,” U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton said in a statement.
During the eight-day trial, evidence showed a number of patients at Baylor Scott & White’s SurgiCare in North Dallas experienced heart issues during various medical procedures, including low-risk surgeries, performed between May and August 2022.
Over four months, Ortiz secretly injected numerous bags of intravenous fluid with “heart-stopping drugs” and nerve blocking agents, and left them for his unsuspecting coworkers like “ticking time bombs,” prosecutors said.
At the time, another anesthesiologist who worked at the facility, Dr. Melanie Kaspar, died while treating herself for dehydration using one of the IV bags that had been tainted by Ortiz.
John Kaspar, Dr. Kaspar’s widower, testified that she died after suffering a “serious cardiac event” and with the IV from her workplace still in her arm as he tried desperately to save her life with CPR.
However, prosecutors never brought murder charges against Ortiz, even as Kaspar’s autopsy found a lethal dose of bupivacaine, a local anesthetic used to numb specific areas of the body, which had been found on the bags Ortiz tampered with.
Ortiz was later caught on surveillance cameras placing the IV bags into a warming bin at the facility, checking on them later, and loading syringes with a mix of harmful drugs before injecting them into the bags.
Based on the evidence, Ortiz was arrested and stripped of his medical license in September 2022 as authorities alleged he intended for the contaminated IV bags to be used in surgeries performed by his colleagues.
As his unwitting coworkers took up the poisoned bags one by one, Ortiz acted as if nothing was wrong while several health emergencies unfolded around him.
The four victims aside from Kaspar included men and women who ranged in age from 18 to 78.
Each of these patients suffered cardiac arrest during low-risk procedures and they had to be rushed to the emergency room.
Although he was only charged in these four cases, Ortiz was a suspect in more than a dozen other unexplained emergencies during the same four-month period of 2022.
Previously, court documents showed Ortiz had a history of disciplinary actions against him and complained the facility was trying to “crucify” him.
At the time of the incidents, Ortiz was under disciplinary review for an alleged medical error he committed during a surgery involving him, prosecutors said.
In one instance, a nurse said Ortiz refused to use an IV bag she took from the warmer by “physically waving the bag off,” court documents show. Federal agents saw Ortiz on footage exit his operating room carrying an IV bag concealed in a paper folder, swap the bag with another bag from the warmer, and walk away.
About half an hour later, a 54-year-old woman suffered a cardiac emergency during a scheduled cosmetic surgery after a bag from the warmer was used during her procedure.
Notably, none of the cardiac events happened during surgeries Ortiz was involved in and none happened when he was on vacation.
Ortiz’s motive for the crime was not entirely clear, although prosecutors said they believe he was upset about being investigated for a mistake he made during surgery and might have wanted to make trouble for other doctors to improve his own image.
At the time of his arrest, all surgeries at the medical facility had to be halted because of the investigation.
