Over the course of two years, Christopher Duntsch operated on 38 patients in the Dallas area. He declared bankruptcy after listing debts of over $1 million. When Henderson opened the freshly made incisions on her, he was appalled. Duntsch is at the O. He was a genius. My experience with this doctor has been great. 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. 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. The sponge triggered a severe blood-borne infection that caused Glidewell to become septic. and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee Health Center. When he called Duntsch's office, he was told it would "go away." Floella Brown went under Dr. Deaths knife in July 2012 and shortly after her surgery, she suffered a massive stroke caused by Duntsch slicing her vertebral artery during surgery. 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.". Martin would become Duntschs first casualty when she bled out in intensive care unit after her relatively common procedure. He wrote grants and secured more than $3 million in funding. When he began at MISI, Duntsch hired an assistant, Kimberly Morgan, and she started on August 29, 2011. The Dallas district attorney's office subpoenaed every hospital on Duntsch's CV for records of his surgeries. ", "Doctor Guilty of Felony Medical Malpractice", "Disciplinary actions against doctors have plunged during the pandemic, but that doesn't mean they are behaving", "An Update on Dr. Death Victim Philip Mayfield", "Jeff Glidewell Today: Where Is Dr. Death's Last Patient Now? Henderson sent Duntsch's picture to the University of Tennessee to determine whether he actually had a degree from that institution and received confirmation that Duntsch, in fact, did. His mother, Susan, was a school teacher. The Legislature has also made suing hospitals difficult. Philip is one of more than 30 people maimed by Dr. Christopher Duntsch, nicknamed Dr. Death by the media. They talked about marriage quickly, and they moved in together within three months. 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. At the time, Duntsch was accused of injuring 33 out of 38 patients in less than two years before the Texas Medical Board revoked his license. 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. He had complex regional pain syndrome, a rare type of chronic pain that caused his skin to blister and peel off. I thought he was either really, really good, or hes just really, really arrogant and thought he was good, Hoyle said. During surgery, Duntsch damaged Summers' vertebral artery causing it to bleed uncontrollably. The surgery was supposed to take less than 45 minutes and ultimately lasted over four hours. B. Ellis Unit outside Huntsville. When Henderson saw the imaging from Duntsch's surgery, he was certain that there would be legal action, and had the salvage surgery recorded. In my opinion, we had a serial killer in our medical community, Dr. Randall Kirbysays of Christopher Duntsch in "Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story.". [19][16] 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. Duntsch initially attended Millsaps College to play Division III college football, and later transferred to Division I Colorado State University. Those words continue to haunt her, and she's tormented by the knowledge that her endorsement caused others to select Duntsch themselves. After he arrived in town, he secured a deal with the Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano and was given surgical rights at the hospital. Where is Christopher Duntsch AKA Dr. Death now? Jerry Summers, who grew up with Christopher Duntsch in Tennessee, was left a quadriplegic after agreeing to let "Dr. Death" operate on his neck. They have two sons. He was smart. [38] Shughart countered that the 2011 email, sent after his first surgeries went wrong, proved that Duntsch knew his actions were intentional. His pain management specialist advised against an operation but referred him to a neurosurgeon named Christopher Duntsch. 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. Her husband could not hold himself up; he had no support of his own and could barely speak. 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. Through it all, Duntsch was able to lure patient after patient under his knife was his extreme confidence. Joshua Jackson went to the dark side to play Dr. Christopher Duntsch, who's serving a life sentence for maiming a woman during surgery, in the new Peacock series Dr. Death. For the last three days, jurors listened to testimony in the . Page opened a desk drawer and saw a mirror with a pile of cocaine and a rolled-up dollar bill on top. As Burke says in "Dr. Death," "No matter what happens, no matter what somebody does to you or the people you love, all you're gonna get is $250,000. The first screening came back diluted with tap water, but a second, taken a few days later, came back clean. Even though he lived in Colorado, he returned to Dallas to see his two sons. He recommended fusing two of her vertebrae and the insertion of "hardware" in her spinal area. [47] A follow-up docuseries, Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story, was later released on Peacock on July 29, 2021, featuring interviews with some of Duntsch's patients and colleagues, as well as with Henderson, Kirby and Shughart. Several of Duntsch's surgeries at Baylor Plano resulted in severely maimed patients: Baylor Plano officials found that Duntsch failed to meet their standards of care and permanently revoked his surgical privileges. When Morgan asked Duntsch about the woman in his house, he said she was just his secretary and friend. Dr. Randall Kirby, a general and vascular surgeon, assisted with Morguloff. It stars Joshua Jackson as Duntsch, Alec Baldwin as Robert Henderson, Christian Slater as Randall Kirby and AnnaSophia Robb as Michelle Shughart. She was 27, and he was 40. Despite several warnings from his colleagues that he was not doing the surgery correctly and was attempting to put screws into muscle rather than bone, Duntsch persisted. Christopher was raised along with his three younger siblings in a wealthy suburb in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Death was fired before the end of his first week for the damage hed inflicted on Brown and Efurd. However, the surgery had to be moved to November 14 because Duntsch had failed to order the appropriate surgical hardware and equipment. "Something was wrong," Dr. Rimlawi said, "whether it be impairment from drugs, alcohol, mental illness, or a combination of all three." He is a graduate of Evangelical Christian School in the Cordova suburb of Memphis, where he starred in football.[7]. Ellis Unit outside of Huntsville, Texas. His sophomore year, he made it as one of the few walk-on players. A Texas jury found Christopher Duntsch guilty Feb. 14 of maiming patients who had turned to him for surgery to resolve debilitating injuries. As a result, Summers lost almost 1,200 mL of blood. "[45], Wondery Media launched a ten-episode podcast series named Dr. Death, focusing on Duntsch. Donald Duntsch was a gridiron football standout in Montana, and . Efurd eventually gained back some control and mobility, but she now uses a wheelchair and suffers chronic pain. [37][4], Over objections from Duntsch's lawyers, prosecutors called many of Duntsch's other patients to the stand in order to prove that his actions were intentional. He later recalled that he read about Martin's death on the day before the surgery, but Duntsch cursed him out when he called to ask about it. Duntschs career started off bright. 'Hot TikTok doc' urges young people to get jabbed - warning of dangers of long Covid, Daughter, 39, guilty of stabbing mum to death before setting house on fire and dumping her dismembered body in river, Pregnant beautician loses baby after savage beating by monster husband who kidnapped her amid divorce row, Shocking moment man is crushed to death by an enraged elephant after crowd taunts herd of jumbos. Unfortunately, it's all too real. [9][16], As part of their investigation, prosecutors obtained a December 2011 email in which Duntsch boasted 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. 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. By the end of the week, administrators told Duntsch he would no longer be operating at Dallas Medical Center. [7] While operating on Jacqueline Troy, Duntsch cut one of her vocal cords and an artery and also damaged her trachea. One screw was jabbed directly into her spinal canal and had skewered the nerves that control one leg and the bladder. 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. Dr. Hassan Chahadeh, the owner, said when Duntsch had applied for privileges, his record was clean. A disc in his lower spine had blown out, and the pieces had to be picked out of the space above. Duntsch recommended fusing Morguloff's L5-S1 vertebrae, and the surgery was scheduled for January 11, 2012. The series peers into the torturous crimes of . [9] Duntsch completed his undergraduate degree in 1995, then continued on to an ambitious MDPhD program. "After building a flourishing neurosurgery practice, everything suddenly changes when patients entering Dr. Duntsch's operating room for complex but routine spinal surgeries start leaving permanently disabled or dead. He was brilliant. His resume looked brilliant on paper," journalistMatt Goodman said of Christopher Duntsch's ability to continue to gain employment at Texas hospitals despite a deadly track record. Advertisement. At the time of their meeting, Young was working as a dancer in a strip club. During surgery, Duntsch operated on the wrong part of Fennell's back. DiscGenics says its mission is toimprove the lives of those suffering from the debilitating effects of degenerative diseases of the spine. 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. The hospital hired him and granted him temporary surgical privileges until his reference checks were completed. Duntsch, once a neurosurgeon, is the focal point of the new streaming Peacock docuseries "Dr. Death." D Magazine gave him the nickname in its reporting in 2016. From 2011 to 2013, dozens of patients in the Dallas area woke up after their surgeries with horrible pain, numbness and, paralysis. It told the unfortunately true story of Doctor Christopher Duntsch, who was eventually sentenced to life in prison for maiming an elderly patient.