Christopher Duntsch
26 min read
I am sorry in advance that this blog post is so long. Every victim deserves to have their story told, and unfortunately, Christopher Duntsch, aka Dr. Death, has 33. There are many sick people in the world, but Duntsch takes the cake for me.
Introduction
Lee Passmore was thirty-seven and worked as a field agent for the Collin County medical examiner. In November 2011, he was hooked on the prescription opiates that numbed the pain in his lower back. He thought surgery might give him some relief and stop his need for drugs. His pain management specialist advised against an operation but referred him to a neurosurgeon named Christopher Duntsch. Passmore met with Dr. Duntsch and was impressed by his confidence; he would fix him. The surgery was scheduled for December 30, 2011.
Lee Passmore's screams poured out from the ICU and down the hallway. Duntsch told his friends and family that Passmore would be fine in a day or two and to not worry about it. However, on January 6, 2012, a week after the surgery, Dr. Duntsch performed another operation on Passmore. A disc in his lower spine had blown out, and the pieces had to be picked out of the space above. In addition, a ligament in his leg was severed, and a screw was stripped and lodged into a nerve bundle.
Passmore can't feel his feet; his chest shakes, his right-hand jitters, he can't run or swim with his kids, he struggles with incontinence, and he has nerve pain that fires through his back. Yet, in April 2012, he returned to work just four months after surgery. One day, he happened to see a fax come in to the medical examiner's office. It had come from Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano. There were two names on the top page: Kellie Martin and Christopher Duntsch.
Passmore focused on recovery and getting back to work in the months following his surgery. He didn't contact a lawyer, although he struggled with the decision. Then came the fax, and he saw Duntsch's name next to Kellie Martin's. An investigator by trade and nature, Passmore started digging into Dr. Christopher Duntsch. He knew this couldn't have been a one-time mistake.
Early Life
Christopher Duntsch was born in Montana on April 3, 1971. His father, Donald, was a physical therapist and Christian missionary. His mother, Susan, was a school teacher. Christopher was raised along with his three younger siblings in a wealthy suburb in Memphis, Tennessee. Donald Duntsch was a gridiron football standout in Montana, and Christopher was determined to follow in those footsteps. Although he wasn't a talented athlete, he trained for hours on his own and made it as a linebacker on his high school football team at Evangelical Christian School in Memphis.
Christopher Duntsch ended up at Millsaps College in Mississippi to play football and was offered financial aid. But he yearned to play linebacker for a Division 1 team and set his sights on the Colorado State Rams. His sophomore year, he made it as one of the few walk-on players. Chris Dozois, a fellow linebacker with the Rams, recalled Duntsch struggling, even with basic drills, but begging to run them over and over until he got it right.
Duntsch on football team
Credit: ProPublica
Homesick, Duntsch left Colorado after a year and transferred to Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis. He hoped to play football, but his multiple transfers revoked his eligibility. It was then that Christopher decided to switch his career to medicine. He wanted to become a doctor, and not just any doctor - a neurosurgeon, operating on injured backs and necks.
Medical Training
Duntsch earned his undergraduate degree in 1995 and enrolled at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He earned his M.D. among the top 12 percent of medical school graduates in his class named to the elite Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. He completed a spine fellowship program at the Semmes-Murphey Clinic in Memphis for his surgical residency, spending the standard five years on neurosurgery and one-year learning general surgery.
In 2005, about a third of the way through his residency, department chairman Dr. Jon Robertson appointed Duntsch program director of the school's tissue bank. He ran two labs, gained experience writing grants, and earned more than $3 million in funding for research projects. In 2006, Duntsch teamed up with two Russian stem cell scientists: Valery Kukekov and Tatyana Ignatova. They created a method for culturing the stem cells of intervertebral discs outside of the body.
Duntsch filed a patent for the technology, and he listed himself as one of the inventors even though he had not discovered it. On top of this, he misspelled both Kukekov and Ignatova's names. While they were in the lab working, Duntsch went to work raising money for a company he called DiscGenics. He secured investments in Discgenics from local spine surgeons, including Dr. Robertson and Dr. Kevin Foley, a prominent Memphis neurosurgeon Duntsch spent a year training under as part of the surgery fellowship at the Semmes-Murphey Clinic.
Around this time, Christopher Duntsch's behavior became noticeably erratic. During a deposition, Megan Krane recalled Duntsch eating a paper blotter of LSD and taking prescription painkillers on his birthday. She also said they snorted cocaine from a small pile he kept on a dresser in his home office. She witnessed Duntsch put on his lab coat and make his rounds the following morning as if nothing had happened. One of the early investors in DiscGenics, Rand Page, said Duntsch would be mixing a vodka orange juice during their morning meetings. Once, he stopped by to pick up some paperwork. Page opened a desk drawer and saw a mirror with a pile of cocaine and a rolled-up dollar bill on top.
Dr. Frederick Boop, chief of neurosurgery at the hospital where Duntsch was completing his residency, said that university officials asked Duntsch to take a drug test. He avoided it and disappeared for several days. He was sent to a program for impaired physicians when he returned but was allowed to finish his residency. Boop said that Duntsch spent his final year as an attending physician and could not operate independently.
However, it wasn't clear how much training Duntsch received. The Dallas district attorney's office subpoenaed every hospital on Duntsch's CV for records of his surgeries. According to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, a neurosurgery resident does about 1,000 operations during training. But based on documents gathered by the DA, when Duntsch finished his residency, he had operated fewer than 100 times. His CV also conveyed he earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from St. Jude Children's Research Hospitals, graduating summa cum laude. However, St. Jude says there was no such program at the hospital. Duntsch also appears in no yearbooks during the time in which he says he earned his Ph.D.
Relationships
In 2011, Christopher Duntsch met Wendy Young at the Beauty Shop bar in Memphis. She was 27, and he was 40. Young let him buy her an appletini, and they felt a connection; eventually, she went home with Duntsch. They talked about marriage quickly, and they moved in together within three months. At the time, Duntsch was looking for operating prospects in Dallas, San Diego, and New York. Young had family in Dallas and decided she would go with him if he picked that city. She was dancing at a strip club in Memphis, and Duntsch's issues with his business, DiscGenics, grew more severe. Duntsch, who had been listed as the founder, president & chief science officer, was being sued by the former chief operating officer and was dismissed from his roles and seat on the board. Moving made sense for both of them.
Girlfriend, Wendy Young, and their son
Credit: Van Wey Law
On May 24, 2011, Christopher Duntsch signed a physician services agreement with Rimlawi and Won's Minimally Invasive Spine Institute (MISI) in Dallas. The deal required Duntsch to attain privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano. Base compensation was $600,000 a year for two years, beginning on June 14, 2011. Duntsch also received forty percent of all revenue he generated beyond $800,000 each year.
When he began at MISI, Duntsch hired an assistant, Kimberly Morgan, and she started on August 29, 2011. In October 2011, she registered articles of incorporation to form Duntsch's practice, the Texas Neurosurgical Institute. That same month, the two began an affair. Their fling was confined to his office at Baylor Plano, and Morgan said in her deposition that he frequently drank vodka and did medical research for hours.
Duntsch moved into a five-bedroom house not far from the hospital. Wendy Young had just given birth to their son and lived there with him. Young said that Morgan visited often. Although she didn't think much of it and assumed Morgan was helping with research. When Morgan asked Duntsch about the woman in his house, he said she was just his secretary and friend.
By this time, Jerry Summers, his childhood friend, had moved from Tennessee to live with Duntsch. He had a bedroom upstairs in their Plano house. Summers had a credit card in his name connected to Duntsch's account and would drive him around, balance his checkbooks, and pick up his dry cleaning. Morgan says they spent a lot of time in clubs. Ghostbar, Dragonfly at Hotel Zaza. "If he wasn't doing research, he was out with Jerry Summers, partying," Morgan said in her deposition.
Duntch’s first day of neurosurgery
Credit: ProPublica
Career
According to court documents, surgeons at the Minimally Invasive Spine Institute soon grew suspicious of Duntsch. "Something was wrong," Dr. Rimlawi said, "whether it be impairment from drugs, alcohol, mental illness, or a combination of all three." Duntsch lasted about three months at MISI. During his short tenure, he spent little time in the operating room. MISI representatives stated he would brag about his capabilities and be critical of the work of other surgeons. His first and only surgery with MISI was on a Thursday in September 2011 at Baylor Plano. Duntsch operated and flew out to Las Vegas without securing a call physician. The hospital called Rimlawi when it couldn't reach his colleague. When Duntsch finally returned on Monday, he was fired. Dr. Rimlawi called Baylor Plano and advised them against continuing a relationship with Christopher Duntsch, but this fell to deaf ears. Baylor wanted Duntsch operating quickly and often so they could be reimbursed for the monies they had advanced to him.
Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano (now Baylor Scott and White Medical Center - Plano)
On November 7, 2011, Dr. Duntsch was scheduled to perform his first surgery at Baylor Plano on Kenneth Fennell for his back pain. However, the surgery had to be moved to November 14 because Duntsch had failed to order the appropriate surgical hardware and equipment. Duntsch had come highly recommended to Fennell and wooed him with boasts that he'd soon be head of Baylor Medical Center's entire neurosurgery department. During surgery, Duntsch operated on the wrong part of Fennell's back. But when he awoke and was experiencing extreme pain, Dr. Duntsch said that surgery had been a success and there had been no complications.
Then, on December 6, 2011, he operated on seventy-four-year-old Mary Efurd. She had suffered from lower back pain for years and was referred to Duntsch by her pain management doctor. He recommended fusing two of her vertebrae and the insertion of "hardware" in her spinal area. It was completely unnecessary, didn't relieve her pain, and only set her up for another needed surgery.
On December 30, 2011, Duntsch operated on Lee Passmore. Passmore had a herniated disc in his lower spine pressing on a nerve causing him pain. At one point, an assisting surgeon named Dr. Hoyle observed Duntsch performing such alarming and erratic behavior; he grabbed his hands and pleaded with him to stop. Hoyle called the surgery sloppy enough to cancel the remaining four operations he had scheduled with Duntsch and vowed never to work with him again.
Berry Morguloff was Dr. Duntsch's next unsuspecting victim. He was a forty-five-year-old man with typical back problems. Duntsch recommended fusing Morguloff's L5-S1 vertebrae, and the surgery was scheduled for January 11, 2012. The operation should have taken less than ninety minutes; it ultimately lasted four and a half hours. Dr. Randall Kirby, a general and vascular surgeon, assisted with Morguloff. Before the surgery, Kirby related that Duntsch said he was the best spine surgeon in Dallas and the only spine surgeon trained in minimally invasive spine surgery. Unfortunately, when Morguloff woke up, he began to experience continuous pain, paresthesia, and loss of sensation in his left leg. Duntsch continued to medicate Morguloff with prescription pain killers and ignored the change in his condition. No diagnostic imaging studies were ordered, and no reasonable explanation was offered for his condition. When he called Duntsch's office, he was told it would "go away." Morguloff sought a second opinion on his excruciating pain from Dr. Michael Desaloms. An MRI revealed that multiple bone fragments in his spinal canal were compressing and adhering to his S1 nerve and that Duntsch had installed the hardware incorrectly. Morguloff had become addicted to the pain killers being prescribed to him by this time.
Barry and Samantha Morguloff
Credit: Anton Floquet/NBCUniversal
Baylor Plano allowed Duntsch to continue operating despite the documented issues with Kenneth Fennell, Mary Efurd, Lee Passmore, and Barry Morguloff's surgeries. Just weeks after permanently maiming Morguloff, Dr. Duntsch operated on his lifelong friend and roommate, Jerry Summers. Summers asked Duntsch to fix his chronic neck pain from a high school football injury that had gotten worse after a car accident. During surgery, Duntsch damaged Summers' vertebral artery causing it to bleed uncontrollably. As a result, Summers lost almost 1,200 mL of blood. To stop the bleeding, he packed the space with so much anticoagulant foam that it constricted Summers' spine. Duntsch also removed so much bone and muscle tissue from Summers' neck that his head was no longer secure on his body.
When Jerry Summers woke up, he couldn't move his arms or legs. As he lay there in agony, Duntsch was nowhere to be found. So, Summers used the only thing he had left, his voice, to scream and yell, even telling the nurses that he and Duntsch had done an eight ball of cocaine the night before his surgery. In his deposition, Summers admitted he made up the pre-surgery cocaine binge because he felt Duntsch had abandoned him, as both his doctor and his friend. Baylor officials took Summers' accusation seriously and ordered Duntsch to take a drug test. He stalled at first, telling administrators he got lost on the way to the lab. A few days later, he took the test and passed. He was put on probation for three weeks and told to stick to relatively minor procedures when he returned. Summers remained quadriplegic for the rest of his life. He died in 2021 of an infection related to complications from Duntsch's operation.
Jerry Summers
Credit: Anton Floquet/NBCUniversal
Just one day after his suspension had ended, Duntsch operated on Kellie Martin. The surgery was supposed to take less than 45 minutes and ultimately lasted over four hours. During surgery, he cut a major vessel in her spinal cord. An anesthesiologist and Dr. Anson Fulton, who assisted with the surgery, warned Duntsch about the blood loss, and he continued to ignore them and operate. When Martin awoke from anesthesia, she was screaming and clawing at her legs which had become patchy and full of purple streaks and spots. She was moved to the ICU and died due to blood loss. No one came out and spoke with Kellie Martin's family or informed them of her condition during this time. Dr. Fulton never worked with Duntsch again.
Kellie Martin
Credit: Dallas Morning News
Baylor Plano again ordered Duntsch to take a drug test. The first screening came back diluted with tap water, but a second, taken a few days later, came back clean. However, Baylor did not fire him; instead, he was allowed to resign. Leaving on April 20, 2012, with a lawyer-negotiated letter saying, "All areas of concern with regard to Christopher D. Duntsch have been closed. As of this date, there have been no summary or administrative restrictions or suspension of Duntsch's medical staff membership or clinical privileges during the time he has practiced at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano."
Since Duntsch's departure was technically voluntary, Baylor Plano was under no obligation to report him to the Texas Medical Board or the National Practitioner Data Bank. The databank was established in 1990 and tracks malpractice payouts and adverse actions against doctors, such as being fired, banned from Medicare, handed a lengthy suspension, or having their license suspended or revoked. During his tenure at Baylor Plano, Kimberly Morgan assisted in every surgery with Duntsch. Morgan didn't follow Duntsch after he left, however. She says she even filed a temporary protective order against him in April 2012, after he showed up banging on her window at 2 am. But, she never reported Duntsch up the ladder or told anyone about the horrors she witnessed in the operating room.
Credit: Dallas Morning News
Dallas Medical Center in Farmers Branch
Duntsch's next stop was at Dallas Medical Center. The hospital hired him and granted him temporary surgical privileges until his reference checks were completed. Then, on July 24, 2012, he operated on Floella Brown. Duntsch pierced and blocked her vertebral artery with a misplaced screw and refused to stop despite the massive blood loss. She bled so much that blood was saturating the blue draping around her body and dripping onto the floor. The nursing staff put down towels to soak it up. After the operation, Brown woke up and seemed fine, but early the following day; she lost consciousness. The pressure was building inside her brain. With Brown still in the ICU, Duntsch took another patient into surgery that morning. The patient was Mary Efurd coming in for a second operation.
Duntsch arrived at the hospital about 45 minutes after Efurd's surgery had been scheduled. When he arrived, Nurse Kyle Kissinger spotted a hole in Duntsch's scrubs. "It's on the butt cheek of his scrubs. He didn't wear underwear. That's why it really shined down to me," Kissinger said in an interview. He realized he'd seen that hole for three straight days — Duntsch hadn't changed his scrubs all week. Kissinger also noticed that Duntsch had pinpoint pupils and hardly seemed to blink. The staff told Duntsch that Brown, his patient from the day before, was in critical condition. However, he ignored them and proceeded with his scheduled surgery on Efurd.
Soon after starting Efurd's surgery, Duntsch turned to Kissinger and told him he would be performing a craniotomy on Floella Brown. The process involves cutting a hole in the skull to relieve the pressure in the brain. The problem was that Dallas Medical Center did not perform those or even have the proper equipment to do them. So as Duntsch operated on Efurd, he quarreled with Kissinger and his supervisors, insisting on a craniotomy for Brown. All the while, the operating room staff questioned whether Duntsch was putting hardware into Efurd in the right places and noticed he kept drilling and removing screws. In the end, Floella Brown never regained consciousness because Duntsch refused to transfer her to another doctor in time, and her family had to remove her from life support. In addition, a neurosurgeon hired to review Brown's case found that Dr. Duntsch had misdiagnosed the source of her pain and was operating in the wrong place.
The day after Mary Efurd's surgery, she awoke in excruciating pain and could not turn over or wiggle her toes. Dr. Robert Henderson was brought in on July 28, 2012, to perform a revision surgery on Efurd. When Henderson opened the freshly made incisions on her, he was appalled. Three holes had been poked into Efurd's spinal column where Duntsch had tried and failed to insert screws. One screw was jabbed directly into her spinal canal and had skewered the nerves that control one leg and the bladder. Henderson then cleaned out bone fragments and discovered that one of Efurd's nerve roots was gone entirely. Duntsch had also installed hardware into her muscle, not her bone, so loose that it moved when you touched it. To top it all off, he was operating on the wrong portion of her back. Efurd eventually gained back some control and mobility, but she now uses a wheelchair and suffers chronic pain.
Mary Efurd
Credit: Texas Observer
Dr. Henderson thought the operation on Mary Efurd was so botched that Christopher Duntsch had to be an imposter. He said even a person with the most basic sense of human anatomy would know they were operating in the wrong area. Henderson sent Duntsch's picture to the University of Tennessee to determine whether he had a degree from that institution and received confirmation that Duntsch was not a fraud. He called Duntsch's fellowship supervisor in Memphis and the supervisor of Duntsch's residency; it was then that he learned about the incident that led him to be referred to the impaired physician program. By the end of the week, administrators told Duntsch he would no longer be operating at Dallas Medical Center. However, Duntsch was allowed to resign, and the hospital didn't notify the National Practitioner Data Bank...again.
Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco (now Frisco Ambulatory Surgery Center)
In September 2012, Jeff Cheney went to Duntsch to relieve the pain that had moved from his shoulder down to his arm. Cheney recalled wondering why a neurosurgeon with such outstanding credentials would be operating at a lower-tiered hospital on the way to his surgery. When he woke, he could not move anything on the right side of his body. Dr. Duntsch said to Cheney, "I don't know why you're this way. Everything went perfect in there." Jeff Cheney later learned that part of his spinal cord had been cut during the operation. He was left with pain so debilitating he could not work any longer and now spends most of his days at home.
Marshall Muse was scheduled to have a disc removed in his back. The night before his surgery, he read online about Kellie Martin's death just months earlier. "I called Dr. Duntsch up, and I said, 'I saw this online.' Immediately, he started yelling and cussing at me, saying, 'How dare you? I can't believe that you're accusing me of killing someone,'" Muse recounted. "He said the patient died from having an allergic reaction to the anesthesia." The explanation was enough to satisfy Muse. During his surgery, Duntsch didn’t installed the necessary hardware to Muse’s spine and instead had left it floating between the spine and muscle tissue. Dr. Duntsch assured Muse that the pain was normal and prescribed him, strong pain killers, causing him to spiral into an addiction.
In December 2012, Jacqueline Troy was left barely able to speak above a whisper after Duntsch cut her vocal cords and one of her arteries. She was transferred to a Dallas hospital after suffering from a severe infection, and Randal Kirby was asked to operate on her. When Kirby learned the details, he immediately asked the doctor who referred the case to him about the surgeon: "Is it a guy named Christopher Duntsch?" It was. While Kirby was repairing Troy, he uncovered that Duntsch had pinned her esophagus under a plate near her spine and poked holes in her trachea. She was left with just one vocal cord. Troy was sedated for weeks and forced to eat through a feeding tube because food was getting into her lungs. Despite all of this, Duntsch was retained by South Hampton when new owners bought it and renamed it University General Hospital.
South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas (now University General Hospital)
In May 2013, Dr. Randall Kirby was invited to a dinner by University General Hospital to meet their new neurosurgeon, Dr. Duntsch. Kirby was shocked; he called the owner of University General and warned him that Duntsch would hurt someone, and the hospital would be over. Dr. Hassan Chahadeh, the owner, said when Duntsch had applied for privileges, his record was clean. If Baylor Plano or Dallas Medical had reported him to the Texas Medical Board or the National Practitioner Databank, hiring personnel would have been notified something was wrong. Chahadeh was worried about his facility and getting sued by Duntsch; he said to Dr. Kirby that they had already given him privileges. They didn't have enough evidence to stop him because he hadn't done anything wrong yet. Kirby warned him again that it was only a matter of time.
Duntsch approached Pam Trusty about being on camera during a follow-up visit where she was still in pain. Trusty was never told she was participating in an infomercial and believed Duntsch had been selected as the top neurosurgeon in Dallas and was participating in a video about the award. Trusty would later find out there was no award and it had just been a paid advertisement. "It's a miracle," she said in the infomercial later promoted on his website. "Dr. Duntsch is one great man." Those words continue to haunt her, and she's tormented by the knowledge that her endorsement caused others to select Duntsch themselves.
In January 2013, Kenneth Fennell was scheduled for another operation because he was still experiencing extreme pain in his back. He thought it was odd that Duntsch wasn't working at Baylor Plano anymore, so he called his insurance company, who stated Christopher Duntsch was in good standing. Unfortunately, when Fennell woke up from surgery, he was paralyzed from the waist down. Duntsch had removed part of his femoral nerve. Fennell is in constant pain, and it took several months of rehabilitation before he could begin to walk with a cane. But, he can only walk 30 feet at a time and cannot stand for more than a few minutes.
On April 9, 2013, Phillip Mayfield was scheduled to have a simple 45-minute operation to alleviate his back pain. Duntsch told Mayfield's wife it went well, but she instantly knew something was wrong as she walked into his room. Her husband could not hold himself up; he had no support of his own and could barely speak. Mayfield was taken to a different hospital and told his spinal cord had already been deformed, and the damage was irreversible. He was told he would never be able to walk again. After intense rehab and his determination, eventually, he was able to use a walker and cane to mobilize himself. However, Mayfield still woke up with paralysis on occasion. In 2014, he developed syringomyelia, a painful condition that causes fluid-filled cysts on the spinal cord. He had complex regional pain syndrome, a rare type of chronic pain that caused his skin to blister and peel off. Mayfield also suffered from random fainting spells that happen every few weeks. Mayfield died of COVID in February 2021; according to his wife, he had been vulnerable to the virus due to complications caused by Duntsch's botched surgery.
Philip and Angela Mayfield
Credit: Anton Floquet/NBCUniversal
Duntsch's next patient was Jeff Glidewell. Duntsch severed his vertebral nerve, his vocal cords, cut a hole in his esophagus, sliced through an artery, and mistook part of his neck muscle as a tumor. Duntsch stuffed Glidewell's throat with a surgical sponge to attempt to stop the bleeding. However, he sewed up Glidewell with the sponge still in place despite others in the operating room warning him about it. The sponge triggered a severe blood-borne infection that caused Glidewell to become septic. When other doctors discovered the sponge, Duntsch refused to return to help remove it. Finally, Dr. Kirby received a call from Hassan Chahadeh. He said, "Randy, you were right. We've had a catastrophic event here. Could you take care of it?" Kirby arrived and transferred Glidewell to a top-tier hospital to perform an emergency operation to remove the sponge. It was determined during the repair surgery that Dr. Duntsch had not even been operating on the correct part of Jeff Glidewell's spine. He was left with only one vocal cord, permanent damage to his esophagus, and partial paralysis on his left side. Kirby claimed that it looked as if Duntsch had tried to decapitate Glidewell and contended that such a botched surgery has not happened in the United States of America before. Glidewell is still in constant pain and has undergone more than 50 procedures to correct the damage left by Duntsch. Thankfully, this ended up being Dr. Christopher Duntsch's last operation.
Jeff Glidewell
Credit: Texas Observer
Criminal Charges
Randall Kirby wrote a detailed complaint to the Texas Medical Board, calling Duntsch a "sociopath" who was "a clear and present danger to the citizens of Texas." Under heavy lobbying from Kirby and Henderson, the Texas Medical Board suspended Duntsch's license on June 26, 2013. Board chairman Irwin Zeitzler later said that complications in neurosurgery were more common than most think. Nevertheless, it took until June 2013 to find the "pattern of patient injury" required to justify suspending Duntsch's license, despite receiving complaints dating back to 2011. Kirby, Henderson, and another doctor decided to contact the district attorney, convinced that Duntsch's malpractice was so egregious it was criminal. They met with an assistant DA but got little traction. Finally, the board permanently revoked Duntsch's license on December 6, 2013.
After his license was revoked, Duntsch fled from Texas. He moved in with his parents in Colorado and filed for bankruptcy, claiming around one million dollars in debt. Officers said he was driving on the left side of the road with two flat tires. After a breath test, Duntsch was arrested for DUI and sent to a detox facility. Even though he lived in Colorado, he returned to Dallas to see his two sons. His older son had been born back when he was at Baylor Plano. His girlfriend, Wendy Young, had a second son in September 2014. In March, the following spring, police were called to a bank in Northeast Dallas after a man with blood on his hands and face was seen beating on the doors. It was Duntsch, babbling about his family being in danger. He was wearing the shirt of his black scrubs, and it was covered in blood. Officers took him to a nearby psychiatric hospital. In April 2015, Duntsch was arrested again for shoplifting $887 worth of merchandise from a Dallas Walmart.
Mugshots
Credit: Van Wey Law
Henderson and Kirby feared that Duntsch could move and theoretically get a medical license in another state. Convinced that he was a clear and present danger to the public, they urged the Dallas County district attorney's office to pursue criminal charges. However, part of the problem was proving that Duntsch's actions were willful as defined by Texas law. After interviewing dozens of Duntsch's patients and their survivors, prosecutors concluded that Duntsch's acts were indeed criminal, and nothing short of imprisonment would prevent him from practicing medicine again.
As part of their investigation, prosecutors obtained a December 2011 email written by Christopher Duntsch. Duntsch boasted to his assistant and mistress, Kimberly Morgan, that he was "... ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold-blooded killer." Assistant district attorney Michelle Shughart, who led the prosecution of Duntsch, later recalled that Henderson and Kirby reached out to her demanding to testify against Duntsch; according to Shughart, doctors rarely testify against each other. As the trial team put it, the "scary pattern" of Duntsch's actions became apparent to the others in the office, leading the DA to give the green light to take the case to a grand jury.
Occam’s Razor email
Full email linked on image
Trial
In July 2015, Duntsch was arrested in Dallas and charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, five counts of aggravated assault causing severe bodily injury, and one count of injury to an elderly person. The indictments were made four months before the statute of limitations ran out. The last charge was for the maiming and paralyzing of Efurd. Prosecutors put a high priority on that charge, as it provided the widest sentencing range, with Duntsch facing up to life in prison if convicted. They also believed that the charge would be easy to prove in court; Duntsch had been told repeatedly that he was not placing the hardware in the correct position, and fluoroscopy images from Efurd's surgery proved this. Prosecutors sought a sentence long enough to ensure that Duntsch would never be able to practice medicine again.
Shughart argued that Duntsch should have known he would hurt others unless he changed his approach and that his failure to learn from his past mistakes demonstrated that his maiming of Efurd was intentional. Prosecutors also faulted Duntsch's employers for not reporting him. They argued that Duntsch was motivated to continue operating because the salary of a neurosurgeon would solve his vast financial issues. Over objections from Duntsch's lawyers, prosecutors called many of Duntsch's other patients to the stand to prove that his actions were intentional. Duntsch's defense blamed their client's actions on poor training and lack of hospital oversight. Shughart countered that the 2011 email, sent after his first surgeries went wrong, proved that Duntsch knew his actions were intentional. After 13 days of trial, the jury needed only four hours to convict him for the maiming of Efurd, and on February 20, 2017, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Where is he now?
Duntsch is at the O. B. Ellis Unit outside Huntsville. He is not eligible for parole until 2045; he will be 74 years old by then. Duntsch is a serial maimer and killer.
Safety Measures
Duntsch's trial has been called a precedent-setting case, as it's the first time that a physician has been convicted on criminal charges for actions in the course of their medical work and malpractice involving botched surgery. The director of neurosurgery at UT Southwestern, Carlos Bagley, testifying for the defense, said that "the only way this happens is that the entire system fails the patients." A neurosurgery expert for Duntsch's defense team himself said, "The conditions which created Dr. Duntsch still exist, thereby making it possible for another to come along."
In March 2014, three former patients of Duntsch's – Mary Efurd, Kenneth Fennel, and Lee Passmore – filed separate federal lawsuits against Baylor Plano, alleging the hospital allowed Duntsch to perform surgeries despite knowing that he was a dangerous physician. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a motion to intervene in the suits to defend Baylor Plano, citing the Texas legislature's 2003 statute that placed a medical malpractice cap of $250,000, and removed the term "gross negligence" from the definition of legal malice. Even if a plaintiff wins the maximum award, after you pay your lawyer and your experts and go through, potentially, years of trial, not much is left.
The Legislature has also made suing hospitals difficult. Texas law states that hospitals are liable for damages caused by doctors in their facilities only if the plaintiff can prove that the hospital acted with "malice"—that is, the hospital knew of the extreme risk and ignored it—in credentialing a doctor. The Legislature not only puts the burden of proof on the plaintiff instead of the defendant in medical malpractice cases, but it also allows hospitals to keep information about doctors confidential. In effect, plaintiffs have to prove a tough case without access to the necessary hospital records. Due to these legal hurdles and costly lawyer fees on the plaintiff's part, few hospitals end up having to pay out after facing a malpractice lawsuit.
Lee Passmore is still fighting. He has taken Baylor Plano to court over changing the Texas law requiring patients to prove that a hospital intended to harm them when it granted privileges to someone unsafe. Passmore told D Magazine during an interview that he is uncomfortable receiving any attention but knows he must do so if anyone is going to listen. Passmore says if he settles, he is allowing the hospital to continue to get away with their negligence.
Credit: Van Wey Law
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch
https://www.propublica.org/article/dr-death-christopher-duntsch-a-surgeon-so-bad-it-was-criminal
https://www.dmagazine.com/healthcare-business/2021/10/a-witness-to-dr-death-in-the-presence-of-a-sociopath/
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2016/november/christopher-duntsch-dr-death/
https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/who-were-the-victims-of-dr-christopher-duntsch
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2014/03/02/planos-baylor-hospital-faces-hard-questions-after-claims-against-former-neurosurgeon/
https://www.texasobserver.org/anatomy-tragedy/
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2015/08/25/7-chilling-thoughts-of-jailed-neurosurgeon-christopher-duntsch/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/greg-abbott-enters-fray-in-lawsuits-involving-sociopath-doctor/
https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/02/a-jury-now-controls-the-fate-of-neurosurgeon-christopher-duntsch/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/victim-of-real-life-dr-death-believes-there-are-others-like-him-out-there?ref=scroll
https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/what-happened-to-discgenics-co-founded-by-dr-death-christopher-duntsch
https://www.texasobserver.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Morguloff-Complaint.pdf