Dallas – Jurors who found a Dallas doctor guilty of tampering with an IV bag said there was no question of his guilt.
They reached their verdict just after noon Friday, finding Dr. Reynaldo Ortiz guilty on all 10 charges.
John Kasper, who lost his wife, sat in the audience and cried as the judge read the verdict. Some hugged, clapped and rushed toward the door to share the news.
“It's like he's carrying so many emotions that he can't even sift through them,” Kaspar said.
He watched as his wife, Dr. Melanie Kasper, took her last breath with a scream of agony after she started an IV for him in a bag she brought home from work.
“It's never over. You know, my best friend is gone,” he said.
Federal prosecutors allege the bag Kaspar used was among more than a dozen Ortiz injected with neuroleptics and other drugs.
Federal prosecutor Liga Simonton said Ortiz left the bag in a shared storage room like a “ticking time bomb.”
She said hearts exploded in 11 patients undergoing routine low-risk surgeries at Baylor Scott & White Surgical Care in North Dallas in the summer of 2022, causing life-threatening cardiac emergencies. That's what it means.
Ortiz's motives have never been fully determined, but prosecutors believe he was angry about being investigated for errors in his surgery. They suggest that he also wanted to cause problems for other doctors in order to make himself look good compared to them.
Ortiz was tried on charges related to four patients, men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 78.
In their case, surveillance footage showed Ortiz setting down an IV bag, returning to check on the patient, and loading a syringe with a cocktail of drugs to be injected.
Juror Penny Rotenberry said: “The video of him putting different drugs into the syringe, and that's what caused it. Yeah.”
“And how the timestamps on the video were combined with the anesthesia records. It all correlated,” added fellow juror Madison Lee.
Jurors said they spent hours considering all the evidence.
“They gave us bags and we could see everything and we could see the holes. That was probably the biggest piece for me,” said Dominic, who also served on the jury. Alcantar said. “It felt like I was being stabbed in the back.”
Ortiz wore a mask for much of the trial but showed no visible reaction to the verdict.
His cousin, Luis Ortiz, said he went to court confident he would win.
“Unfortunately, things went in the opposite direction,” Lewis said.
“Did you think he would be acquitted?” he was asked.
“That's right,” he answered.
But jurors said the evidence convinced them Ortiz was guilty.
“You needed a complete puzzle, and that's…we got it,” Rotenberry said.
Ortiz has not yet been sentenced. A judge will decide on that at a later date. He could be sentenced to up to 190 years in prison. In other words, life.
