A Dallas anesthesiologist was sentenced to 190 years in federal prison for injecting drugs into IV bags, leading to at least one death.
Dr. Raynaldo Ortiz was convicted in April on five counts of intentional adulteration of a drug, four counts of tampering with consumer products resulting in serious bodily injury and one count of tampering with consumer products.
Leigha Simonton, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, compared Ortiz to a gunman "spraying bullets indiscriminately into a crowd" in a statement after the sentencing.
"But he wielded an invisible weapon, a cocktail of heart-stopping drugs, concealed inside an IV bag designed to help patients heal," Simonton said.
Ortiz was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to 2,280 months, which the judge ordered he serve consecutively.
A public defender for Ortiz said the defense "respectfully disagrees" with the verdict and intends to invoke Ortiz's right to appeal.
From May to August 2022, several patients at Baylor, Scott & White SurgiCare North Dallas experienced cardiac emergencies during routine procedures, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
During that time, Dr. Melanic Kaspar, an anesthesiologist who worked at the practice, died shortly after she used an IV bag to treat herself for dehydration.
Doctors began to suspect an issue with the IV bags in August 2022, after an 18-year-old patient’s condition became critical during a routine sinus operation, prosecutors said. A lab analysis of the IV bag used in the procedure found evidence of a drug cocktail that included a nerve-blocking agent, a stimulant and an anesthetic, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said at trial that Ortiz injected saline bags used for the IV drips with epinephrine, bupivacaine and other drugs before he placed them in a warming bin for colleagues to use.
Video presented as evidence also showed Ortiz “repeatedly retrieving IV bags from the warming bin and replacing them” shortly before the bags were taken into surgery, prosecutors said.
Doctors testified that the medical emergencies occurred shortly after new IV bags were hung during the procedures.
Kaspar’s husband, John Kaspar, was one of several people who gave victim impact statements at Ortiz's sentencing, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported.
Kaspar told the station that Ortiz killed his wife. “It wasn’t through malice,” he said. “It was through pure calculation.”
Ortiz has not been charged in Kaspar’s death.
U.S. District Judge David Godbey said Wednesday that Ortiz caused her death and described his other conduct as “tantamount to attempted murder.”
At the time of the cardiac emergencies, Ortiz was facing disciplinary action for “an alleged medical mistake made in one of his own surgeries” and faced losing his license, the prosecutor’s office said in April, citing evidence presented at trial.
The Texas Medical Board suspended Ortiz's license in September 2022 "after determining his continuation in the practice of medicine poses a continuing threat to public welfare."
His suspension was listed as temporary, but the status has not been updated with additional board actions.
