Raynaldo Ortiz was found guilty in April of injecting IV bags with anesthetics, leading to the death of one person and poisoning 11 more. A judge yesterday sentenced him to 190 years in jail, the maximum possible, with no chance of release within his lifetime.
Ortiz was not in the courtroom, having waived his right to sit in Wednesday's sentencing hearing. He chose to sit in another room in the courthouse, out of sight of the victims and their families.
He worked in plain sight hoping the busy hospital environment would conceal his activities, and it did. But once a problem was noticed with the saline he was observed on security footage doing odd things with the bags. He was injecting them with epinephrine, bupivacaine and other drugs, then placing them where they would be used in surgeries to cause dangerous complications.
The severity of the survivors' medical problems, caused by Ortiz, is given extensive coverage in CBS News's article.
The last to speak was Melanie Kaspar's husband, John, who watched his wife die from the drugs that were unknowingly in her IV bag. John Kaspar said he thought about asking to play the 911 call he made when his wife was dying because he didn't think that Ortiz had heard firsthand the pain he caused.
Kaspar said he would be forever haunted by his wife's eyes, which were open and lifeless as she waited for the ambulance to arrive. "Grief consumed me more than I thought possible," he said. Kaspar also commented on Ortiz saying, "he should be sitting here listening to this, but he's a coward. He killed my wife. Not with malice, but with sheer calculation."
Prosecutors have an idea of Ortiz's motives but there's not much to recommend it over "psycho crawled out of his abyss."
Dr. Ortiz was retaliating for being disciplined in 2018 and again in 2021 and 2022. … The prosecution said that Ortiz's two businesses were losing money and faced even more financial trouble if he was stopped from practicing at the Baylor Scott & White Surgicare in North Dallas. Prosecutors said that Ortiz put the dangerous drugs in IV bags to try to show emergency situations happen to a lot of doctors.
