A Dallas doctor has been sentenced to 190 years in prison for , injecting “heart-stopping medicines” into IV bags , at the medical facility where he worked, leading to the death of a co-worker and “numerous respiratory situations”, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Raynaldo Rivera Ortiz Jr. injected IV bags of salt with a nerve-blocking representative and other harmful drugs at , Surgicare North Dallas, according to the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. The carriers were then used in his coworkers ‘ clinics while he was aware that” their people would experience dangerous complications.”
The 60-year-old doctor was  , arrested in September 2022 , and indicted by a grand jurors a month later.
A jury found Ortiz guilty earlier this year of four counts of tampering with consumer products that resulted in serious physical injury, one count of tampering with a consumer goods, and five counts of willful contamination of a medicine after an eight-day test and seven hours of deliberation.
More than two years ago, a scandal surrounding the disgraced doctor was opened by the Dallas Surgery Center as part of a regular medical procedure that was carried out between May 2022 and August 2022.
According to the legal issue, Ortiz was informed of a disciplinary investigation stemming from an event in which he supposedly “deviated from the standard of care” two days later.
An doctor who also worked at the center passed away while administering herself with an IV bag while she was still receiving dehydration at the time, according to the prosecution.
Ortiz, who had a history of disciplinary actions against him, also complained to other specialists that the center was trying to” crucify” him, prosecutors said.
Ortiz “repeatedly retrieving IV luggage from the heat bucket,” according to surveillance video that was shown in court. Ortiz was also depicted in the video, which included “watching as victims were wheeled out by emergency responders” ( p. 2 ).
Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey sentenced Ortiz on Wednesday after finding out that he had caused his colleague’s dying and had “tantamount to attempted murder” from his previous actions.
U.S. Attorney Leigha Simonton said on Wednesday in a statement that” this humiliated doctor acted no better than an armed perpetrator spraying bullets blindly into a crowd.” ” Dr. Ortiz tampered with strange IV sacks without giving a damn about who he hurt,” he claimed. But he wielded an unknown weapon, a concoction of heart-stopping medications, concealed inside an IV case designed to help people heal”.
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