Raynaldo Ortiz: Texas doctor found guilty of injecting IV bags with harmful drugs faces life imprisonment

Warning: This article contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some, readers’ discretion advised.

DALLAS, TEXAS: The Justice Department announced on Friday, April 12, that a Dallas anesthesiologist has been found guilty of injecting harmful drugs into patient IV bags, which resulted in one fatality and multiple cardiac emergencies. 

The defendant, Raynaldo Riviera Ortiz Jr, aged 60, was initially charged by criminal complaint in September 2023 and indicted the following month for tampering with IV bags used at a local surgical center. 

Following an eight-day trial and seven hours of deliberation, a jury convicted him on 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.

Ortiz could get up to 190 years in prison. The court will decide his punishment later.

What did attorneys and investigators say?

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M Boynton said, “The facts brought out at trial in this case are particularly disturbing.The department will work with its law enforcement partners to hold accountable anyone who puts patients’ lives at risk by tampering with critical medical products."  

US Attorney Leigha Simonton for the Northern District of Texas added, "Dr Ortiz cloaked himself in the white coat of a healer, but instead of curing pain, he inflicted it."

Simonton added, "He assembled ticking time bombs, then sat in wait as those medical time bombs went off one by one, toxic cocktails flowing into the veins of patients who were often at their most vulnerable, lying unconscious on the operating table."

"We saw the patients testify. Their pain, their fear and their trauma was palpable in that courtroom."

Special Agent in Charge Charles L Grinstead of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations reported, "Patients expect that their doctors will use only safe and effective medical products during their surgeries. When illicit tampering occurs, serious harm and even death can result."

He added, “Working with our law enforcement partners, we will continue to monitor, investigate and bring to justice those who would risk patients’ health and safety.”

Patients faced unusual cardiac emergencies during routine medical surgeries

Between May and August 2022, many patients at Surgicare North Dallas had heart problems during routine medical procedures done by different doctors. 

About a month after the unexpected heart problems began, an anesthesiologist who had worked at the facility died while using an IV bag to treat herself for dehydration.

She was later identified as a colleague of Ortiz, anesthesiologist Melanie Kaspar. 

Melanie took a contaminated IV bag home on June 21 to rehydrate herself while feeling unwell, according to her autopsy report.

Shortly after starting the IV, she experienced a severe heart problem and died, as per FoxNews.

In August 2022, doctors at the surgical center suspected that contaminated IV bags had caused the repeated emergencies after an 18-year-old patient became very sick during a simple sinus surgery. 

Tests on fluid from the bag used in the teenager’s surgery found harmful drugs that could have caused his symptoms. 

Ortiz secretly put drugs like epinephrine and bupivacaine into IV bags of saline, put them in a warming bin at the facility, and waited for them to be used in colleagues’ surgeries, knowing their patients would get sick. 

Video showed Ortiz taking out IV bags from the warming bin and putting them back, just before they were taken into operating rooms where patients suffered complications after the IV bags were injected.

Ortiz also mixed vials of medication and watched as patients were taken out by emergency responders.

At the trial, doctors testified that they were confused when their patients’ blood pressures suddenly rose. Patients remembered waking up in intensive care units, in pain and scared for their lives.