After a 13-day trial in a Dallas County Courtroom where a jury heard accounts and statements from more than “a dozen patients,” Christopher Duntsch was sentenced to life in prison. Nicknamed “Doctor Death,” Duntsch was accused of “crippling four patients and causing the deaths of two others between July 2012 and June 2013” while working as a neurosurgeon for a number of different hospitals throughout Dallas and Collin counties.
After a 13-day trial in a Dallas County Courtroom where a jury heard accounts and statements from more than “a dozen patients,” Christopher Duntsch was sentenced to life in prison. Nicknamed “Doctor Death,” Duntsch was accused of “crippling four patients and causing the deaths of two others between July 2012 and June 2013” while working as a neurosurgeon for a number of different hospitals throughout Dallas and Collin counties. In 2015 he was arrested on “five aggravated-assault charges.” Despite the numerous charges, the jury focused solely on one “charge of injury to an elderly individual — a first-degree felony where someone intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence injures an elderly person.”
So who was the victim behind the charge that put Duntsch behind bars for the rest of his life? What did Duntsch do to her? The victim was Mary Efurd, an elderly woman who, at the age of 72, went under Duntsch’s knife in 2012 to fuse two of her vertebrae. The surgery itself was considered a simple, routine surgery, so Efurd thought nothing of it when she went in to have the surgery performed. She also felt comforted in being told that Duntsch had years of medical experience. Imagine her shock and horror when she woke to discover that she had “lost a third of her blood and the full use of her legs.”
However, the true horror of her situation came to light when Dr. Robert Henderson went in to treat her botched surgery, saying “Duntsch had done virtually everything wrong.” According to Henderson, he “found implants placed in muscle instead of on bone, a screw drilled into her spinal cavity and a nerve root that had been amputated.” He said it was “as egregious as you can imagine.”
In addition to Efurd’s story, the jury also listened to accounts from other patients who went under Duntsch’s knife to fix ailments like back problems, “only to be left disfigured or immobilized and in excruciating pain.” Sadly, those were the lucky patients. Two of Duntsch’s previous patients, Kellie Martin and Floella Brown, died after being operated on back in 2012 for back surgery. How did he kill them? Well, in Brown’s case, Duntsch “removed bone from an area that was not required by any clinical or anatomical standards, resulting in injury to the vertebral artery.”
In his defense, Duntsch’s lawyers claimed he wasn’t “a skilled surgeon,” and added that he “had been distracted by a chaotic operating room.” According to his defense attorney, Robbie McClung, Duntsch “was on his own and doing the best he could.” That defense wasn’t good enough for the jury or prosecutors, who argued that the doctor “had years of training and knew exactly what he was doing during his botched surgeries. As prosecutor Michelle Shughart said, Duntsch “chose not to get help. He chose to continue maiming and killing patients.”
Sources:
Dallas Doctor Who Performed Questionable Surgeries Gets Life In Prison
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