Within the 1870s, a shiny young dentist — tall, lean, mustachioed and blonde, with a slight speech impediment and a nagging cough — opened his practice in Deep Ellum.
The lanky Georgia native Henry John Holliday had earned a doctorate of dentistry at 19 and won three awards, including best set of gold teeth, at a Dallas County fair.
But Doc, as he was known, had a dark side. Not only was he sick with a terminal illness, tuberculosis, but he also had a gambling habit. Thus, he would never change into the doctor he might need been.
Like another promising healers on this story (most of whom had much more formal medical training and credentials than our outlaw DDS), Doc Holliday can be remembered for less noble reasons.
The law ran Doc out of town after a shootout at a Dallas saloon. He attempted several times to resume a dental practice, historians say, but his hacking concerned potential patients. He went on gaming and gunslinging until he died from his illness in Colorado in 1887.
Dallas is home to substantial medical resources — Baylor Scott & White is probably the most awarded not for-profit health system in Texas (U.S. News & World Report); now we have the No. 1 scientific health care research institution at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Nature Index), the No. 10 overall hospital system within the nation (The Lown Institute) with Parkland Health and the country’s second largest Veterans Affairs hospital system.
But with so many doctors, clinics and hospitals, now and again a nasty actor violates his vow to do no harm.
Dr. Christopher Duntsch became the topic of a Peacock original series for all of the improper reasons. He’s serving a life sentence for gross malpractice that resulted in two direct fatalities and the maiming of greater than 30 neurosurgery patients, as told by Laura Beil, the journalist who hosts the Dr. Death podcast, on which the eponymous show relies.
Beil’s reporting was sensational and entertaining in a true-crime sense, but it surely served a very important public service. It exposed an area health care system that allowed a dangerous doctor to maneuver around to different hospitals reasonably than be scrutinized for his incompetence and, in some cases, willful destruction of patients’ health and lives.
It’s vital to recollect, Beil says, that this “pass the trash” phenomenon, where institutions transfer a destructive worker reasonably than cope with them, will not be consigned to medicine.
Duntsch began his profession at Baylor Scott & White in Plano, but after several of his surgeries led to paralysis, everlasting damage or death, in addition to reports of him showing as much as surgery inebriated, Baylor revoked his privileges.
“The one ‘Holy Cow’ I had, was once I learned from the [then] president of the medical board that, had [Baylor] properly notified them of what was happening … they may have suspended him on an emergency basis while they investigated,” she says. “If that had happened, there are individuals who died who would have still been alive, because he wouldn’t have been able to right away go elsewhere.”
Duntsch performed several surgeries and mangled more patients at South Hampton Community Hospital (now University General Hospital). He sliced through a person’s artery during a surgery at Methodist Hospital, and he left the sponge he used to soak the blood contained in the patient when he sewed him up, causing a horrific infection. Duntsch’s reign of terror, reportedly, ended after that operation.
As recently as 2021, his patients were still dying. Jerry Summers, a primary subject of the Dr. Death podcast, and Philip Mayfield each were left paralyzed with compromised immune systems and died from infections, in response to what Summers’ lawyer and Mayfield’s wife told respective local reporters.
Beil’s podcasts reveal that always hospitals don’t report problematic physicians to governing boards comparable to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which is meant to flag them, due to costs related to fighting and possibly losing wrongful termination suits.
Beil, a resident of Southern Dallas County who has continued to report on deadly docs, says her stories usually are not meant to reflect negatively on the occupation.
“The overwhelming majority of doctors are good and caring individuals who want one of the best for his or her patients,” she says. In actual fact, they’re the heroes within the Duntsch story because they filed complaints, made phone calls and testified against him.
“The thing you don’t want is to be the patient of the doctor who’s the exception,” she says in a single podcast episode. “We’re limited in what we are able to discover about a physician, but a skepticism of a physician you don’t know will not be a nasty thing.”
If there’s an overriding advantage of getting this story on the market, she says, it’s that individuals will take that extra measure, to the degree that they’ll, to guard themselves.
In 2021, Duntsch became the primary doctor to be convicted of a criminal offense committed within the operating room through the act of surgery.
While awaiting trial, Duntsch was arrested attempting to walk out of the Walmart at Northwest Highway and Skillman Street without paying for $887 value of sunglasses, watches,ties, briefcases, cologne and a pair of pants that he placed on within the dressing room, in response to a Dallas Police affidavit filed on April 8, 2015.
A girl known by her clients as Wee Wee operated a clandestine med spa in East Dallas where she offered black-market butt injections.
In 2015, clients hoping to achieve Kardashian-esque curves could ask for the “Wee Wee Booty,” and, 24 hours before their appointment, she would send them the address, 3800 East Side Ave.
The amateur plastic surgeon, Denise Rochelle Ross (Wee Wee), and her assistant, Alicia Clarke, used material that was not secure to inject into clients’ bottoms.
Wykesha Reid, 34, didn’t survive an injection of silicone caulk, which prosecutors said entered her veins, traveled through her heart and was trapped in her lungs. Reid died within the clinic after lying down, saying she felt unwell. Her injectors left her “to rest” overnight and discovered her dead the following day, when Clarke frantically called 911, in response to court records.
In 2017, Wee Wee and her assistant, Clarke, were sentenced to prison for murder in two separate trials. They weren’t doctors, but were practicing medicine with no license, in response to police and court documents; thus their malpractice amounted to murder.
Police documents show Wee Wee was arrested at an Oak Cliff address shortly after they issued a warrant. She was sentenced to 60 years. She was denied parole in 2020.
It’s uncertain whether Wee Wee or Clarke administered the fatal injection. Each woman refused to testify against the opposite.
The risks of pursuing the proper rump usually are not relegated to the black market.
In 2017, a girl from Oklahoma, Rolanda Hutton, sued several cosmetic surgeons and nurses related to the Dallas Plastic Surgery Center after she was left paralyzed following what she said at a press conference was a “botched Brazilian Butt Lift.”
The BBL procedure involves transferring fat from other areas into the buttocks. It’s each an in-demand and dangerous surgery, reports the Recent York Times. “The procedure has the very best mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery, but many ladies are undaunted,” the paper reported in 2021. In 2020 alone, there have been 40,320 buttock augmentations, per the Aesthetic Society.
It’s common practice to maneuver patients to unlicensed post-operative hotels after procedures — in Hutton’s case, The Cloister at Park Lane — but that’s dangerous, her lawyers alleged. The defendants —doctors and nurses with offices in Lake Highlands, East Dallas and University Park amongst them — said, officially, that her claims are without merit.
Court records reveal no settlement reached at the moment.
In December 2021, two doctors and a nurse helped an area hospice agency to scam Medicare and were sentenced to a combined 23 years in prison. Their crimes put patients in danger and allowed non-doctors to distribute dangerous medicine, in response to the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham.
At the least certainly one of those docs, Laila Hirjee, treated patients right here in our neighborhood.
Hirjee, who promoted her White Rock Trail practice on Google (now marked “permanently closed”), was convicted together with Dr. Mark E. Gibbs of conspiracy to commit health care fraud of their role because the medical directors at Novus Health Services.
The founding father of Novus, a non-doctor named Bradley Harris, testified against his former employees after his own conviction months earlier.
He and other staffers who weren’t licensed to practice medicine determined treatment and distributed drugs, Harris testified. They were in a position to accomplish that because Drs. Hirjee and Gibbs essentially provided a pre-signed blank prescription pad on which Harris and others ordered highly regulated substances, comparable to morphine, hydromorphone and fentanyl, at will and without physician oversight.
“The doctors allowed Bradley Harris — an accountant with no medical expertise — to dispense controlled substances like candy,” Meacham said following the trial. “They claimed to have had hands-on experience with hospice patients, when the truth is, they’d entrusted life-or-death medical decisions to untrained businesspeople. We’re satisfied to know they may spend the following decade behind bars.”
Two Dallas physicians and several other co-conspirators ran a medical clinic near White Rock Lake. But reasonably than a spot of healing, it was a front for distributing dangerous and addictive drugs, said U.S. Attorney Sarah R. Saldaña following a 2014 trial during which certainly one of the docs, Nicolas Alfonso Padron, pled guilty to conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance. District Judge Barbara Lynn, a longtime East Dallas resident, ordered forfeiture of Padron’s house, two cars, a ship and several other bank accounts, and sentenced him to 87 months in federal prison. That’s along with time Padron was already serving in an unrelated health care fraud case.
Together with co-defendant Jose L. Martinez, who was convicted in an earlier trial, Padron’s cash-only Padron Wellness Clinic amounted to nothing but a “pill mill,” a front for dealing opiates and benzodiazepine pills, Saldaña said.
The opposite co-defendants, including non-medical staff, were “dealers” who would recruit “patients,” often from homeless shelters, and drive them in groups to the clinic, the prosecution said at trial.
Sometimes, Dr. Padron would see two or more patients at a time within the examination room. He diagnosed the bulk with lower back pain and anxiety without regard to their condition. Once Padron issued the prescriptions, the co-conspirators would drive groups of patients to Urban Independent Pharmacy on Samuell Boulevard to fill the narcotics, most of which the co-conspirators would resell on the road.
The pharmacist, Lisa Hollier, is also serving time in prison for conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance. In all, 17 defendants were convicted related to this pill mill case. The 12 months of this case, in response to the Department of Justice, opiates were accountable for about 115 deaths per day in America.
Within the early 2000s, Dr. Phillip Todd Calvin was seemingly, living the dream.
His marriage hadn’t worked out, but he, his ex-wife and two children enjoyed an amicable relationship. He owned a stunning home in Lakewood, a Mercedes and a single-engine plane. At his private dental practice, he called himself “The Singing Dentist” because he was a baritone within the Dallas Symphony Choir.
But this man’s secret life made Doc Holliday’s look trite.
In February 2005, Calvin and 6 other men were arrested and charged with planning to go to Mexico to have sex with underage boys, FBI spokesperson Laura Eimiller said at a news conference.
She explained how each man paid a whole lot of dollars to an undercover agent at a fake travel agency to rearrange encounters with children at what they believed was a pedophile-friendly bed and breakfast.
In phone calls and emails recorded through the FBI investigation, Calvin suggested he might need had sexual contact with one local youth during his time in Dallas. There’s no evidence or allegations he ever abused any patients or his own children.
Calvin and the opposite convicted predators were members of the National Man/Boy Love Association, a bunch that advocated openly for reducing age-of-consent.
After Calvin was picked up in California, he pleaded guilty to federal charges and spent 24 months in prison. The last time he made news, in a 2009 Arizona newspaper story about sex offenders, he was registered as a “sexually violent predator.”
After the initial shock waned, his ex-wife, Darlene Ellison, told her own story to an area journalist and, later, Oprah —revealing how her children’s father had kept her entirely at nighttime. She wrote a book in 2009 called The Predator Next Door. She is a public speaker and activist fighting for abused children and against pedophilia and predators like her former spouse, in response to a press release from her publisher.
The motive, the jury decided, was retaliation after the neighbor testified against Ortiz at a protective order hearing and helped certainly one of Ortiz’s domestic violence accusers escape his home. In response to documents from the State Medical Board, Ortiz was arrested in 1995 over accusations of assault causing bodily injury to his former spouse.
In June 2022, anesthesiologist Melanie Kaspar was feeling unwell. So the 55-year-old doctor grabbed a bag of what she believed was saline IV fluid from the Preston Hole area surgery clinic where she worked, returned to her Lakewood home, got comfortable, and started filling her veins with the contents of the bag. A number of hours later, she was dead. Investigators would learn that she died from toxic effects of bupivacaine, an area anesthetic that’s fatal when improperly administered. Investigators would also find evidence of the identical drug in additional IV bags on the clinic and more patients suffering complications. Fortunately, those patients were in a hospital setting where they were saved from Kaspar’s fate.
Her fellow anesthesiologist, Dr. Ray Ortiz, was arrested in September, suspected of tampering with IV bags on the clinic.
Criminal allegations against Ortiz are not evidence nor proof of guilt, notes the Department of Justice in a press release. He’s presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. Meanwhile, the Texas Medical Board has suspended his license.
As documented in court, clinic personnel identified greater than 10 cardiac emergencies during otherwise unremarkable surgeries between May and August 2022, and exclusively when Ortiz was within the room.
Ortiz is charged with tampering with a consumer product and with intentionally adulterating drugs. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
This isn’t the doctor’s first time in a courtroom. He was fined $3,000 in August 2022 in relation to a November 2020 incident during which a patient he was anesthetizing required resuscitation and emergency transportation to a different hospital.
Ortiz also had relinquished medical staff privileges at North Garland Surgery Center for failing to confide in the board a previous criminal conviction and arrest “for cruelty to a non-livestock animal,” in response to the Texas Medical Board. In June 2016, a Collin County jury found Ortiz guilty of cruelty to an animal, for shooting and wounding his neighbor’s dog.
The motive, the jury decided, was retaliation after the neighbor testified against Ortiz at a protective order hearing and helped certainly one of Ortiz’s domestic violence accusers escape his home. In response to documents from the State Medical Board, Ortiz was arrested in 1995 over accusations of assault causing bodily injury to his former spouse.