**
-At this point, Duntsch has had 20 surgeries at Baylor Plano.
Most of them have had bad outcomes.
He had hurt a lot of people.
There was one quadriplegic.
But Kellie Martin's surgery
raises a lot of red flags for Baylor.
This was supposed to be a really simple surgery,
but things go horribly wrong.
[ Monitor beeping, respirator hissing ]
Kellie Martin had so much blood loss during her surgery
that her body was not able to keep up with it.
They worked on her for hours trying to save her life,
and ultimately she ended up flatlining.
[ Monitor flatlining ]
Kellie Martin dies.
**
But Kellie Martin shouldn't have died.
The ICU staff are still haunted by her death.
-He entered the room with two other doctors.
Dr. Duntsch was looking at the floor
the entire time,
and it was the pulmonologist that said,
"We're so sorry, but Kellie is no longer with us."
**
-And that's when it hit.
[ Sniffles ]
[ Voice breaking ] It was real.
And...
I just knew that my world just --
I just -- my world just turned upside down.
My loss.
And then that's when my girls lost it, too.
-It was such a slow-motion feeling of,
"My mom is gone.
This person, my best friend, the rock of our family,
the center of our universe...
she's gone!
And I'm never going to get to talk to her again!"
**
-I stood up and I literally was drilling them,
question after question,
lunging at them in so much frustration.
"What do you mean she's no longer with us?
We've been here for hours, and you keep telling me
that we're going to see her soon!"
And Dr. Duntsch wasn't answering any of these questions.
He continued to just stare at the floor.
And I said, "What happened? What did you do to my mother?"
And he just stood there, and he said nothing.
-I was shocked he was operating on Kellie Martin.
I was shocked he was operating on anybody.
-I was told that he blamed Kellie Martin's death
on an abnormal reaction to fentanyl.
Nothing about what happened to Kellie Martin
in the intensive care unit
or after she coded or in the operating room --
I mean, none of that has anything to do
with a reaction to...
to a drug.
-When someone dies suddenly in a hospital,
an autopsy has to be performed.
-The autopsy demonstrated
that he had penetrated through a space
where he shouldn't be
and lacerated a vein,
and the patient bled
in a space where the surgeon would not see it.
-He was operating at least an inch to the side,
three inches too deep,
which should never have occurred.
-She bled to death.
**
-My mother's last moments on earth,
she was bleeding to death?
I mean, we're in a hospital.
Can't they stitch her up or find the wound
and, you know, stop the bleeding?
Our family of four was extremely close.
At this point in time, we're still trying to wrap
our heads around the fact that my mother is no longer with us.
But we did decide to get an attorney.
I thought he was going to ask us what happened, the situation,
but he started off the conversation by saying,
"Did you know that he has hurt people in the past?"
And there was a shock on obviously all of our faces,
and I said, "What do you mean?"
And then he told us the case of Jerry Summers.
-I heard that somebody died after me.
The next patient died.
And I got a couple of phone calls with Chris,
and it was just as upbeat as ever.
He's going to be successful and he was still on track.
In his mind, he was still the shit.
But he never made mention of anybody being hurt or anything.
-If Baylor had stopped him
after what happened with Jerry Summers,
Kellie Martin would still be alive.
-Spine surgeries are very common.
Most everybody knows somebody that's had their back
or their neck operated on.
Yes, complications can occur in some instances,
but throughout the United States and the world,
neck and back surgeries are performed all day, every day.
Pretty simple, straightforward procedures.
-This surgery was a simple surgery.
Duntsch, of course, botched it.
When you can't control somebody's blood pressure,
you have bleeding.
The first thing you look for is bleeding.
The second thing you look for is bleeding.
-There was a probability that he had penetrated through,
which is, it's a bad misadventure,
but that's not malpractice.
The malpractice is not knowing that that can happen.
**
-It was clear he didn't know what he was doing.
He should not have been operating on Kellie Martin.
Or if he was operating on Kellie Martin,
he needed to have another spinal surgeon helping him do the case
and watching every move he made.
-The mistakes that he made in his short time at Baylor
are mistakes that most surgeons never make.
-We all have complications.
If you don't have complications, you're not operating enough.
I mean, they take years off your life, and they should,
because you need to be worried about how your patients do
or you shouldn't be in the game.
-Any normal physician would have stopped operating right away.
But not Duntsch.
In no way did this deter or stop Duntsch at all.
-I haven't seen Christopher Duntsch
as a patient,
but the thing that really, to me,
speaks to psychopathy
is how pervasive and consistent his lack of remorse was.
He was almost unaffected by the death of a patient.
-I picked up the phone and called the CEO
at Baylor Plano, and I said, "Listen, I've never done this,
I've never called a CEO to report another surgeon,
but something's got to be done.
This guy's dangerous."
And all she told me was, "Dr. Hoyle,
I can't go into it with you because of HIPAA violations,
but I can tell you that Dr. Duntsch
resigned his privileges today."
-After Kellie Martin's untimely death,
Baylor Plano removed Christopher Duntsch's privileges
at the facility, so Christopher Duntsch
could no longer operate or round on patients there.
-Duntsch has a real tendency to threaten litigation.
Duntsch brought in his lawyers right away to help negotiate
his leaving Baylor Plano.
-Let's say, in this case, if Dr. Duntsch had sued
and had claimed that they ruined his career
because they wrongfully terminated his privileges --
let's say Dr. Duntsch, a 40-year-old neurosurgeon
at the beginning of his career,
he could earn a million, two million dollars a year,
which is conservative.
And let's say he would have a 25-year career.
If Dr. Duntsch had been successful with his lawsuit,
then the hospital could have been liable for
$25 million, $40 million.
-They knew that he would sue them.
The hospital ended up making a deal with him.
-Baylor ultimately doesn't fire him.
They allow him to resign, and as part of that,
Duntsch's lawyers negotiated a letter
where it's basically a clearance letter
saying that Duntsch has resigned
and was not under any investigations when he resigned.
There's a national data bank
that if Duntsch had resigned under investigation
or was basically fired from the hospital,
then it would have been reported
and it would have been a mark on Duntsch's record.
-They did not report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank,
and they did not report him to the state medical board.
**
-Duntsch, when he leaves Baylor Plano,
looks on paper like he's still a fine surgeon
and he's able to move on to other hospitals.
-The next time that we spoke to our attorney,
he had said that Dr. Duntsch has actually left the hospital
where he had performed my mother's surgery
and is now performing at another hospital in Dallas.
How could he get references?
How could he go into an interview
and another hospital take him on as a surgeon?
Like, this makes no sense.
-In my opinion, he should not have been
allowed to operate anywhere.
How many disasters does it take?
It shouldn't take more than two.
But it did.
-He lasted at Baylor Plano three months.
And he lasted at his next hospital less than a week.
-Kellie is the first patient that Duntsch kills,
but, sadly, not the last.
**
[ Monitor beeping, heartbeat echoing ]
**
-You always look back and see the signs, I guess, don't you?
I wish I would have just grabbed him along the way...
...and just told him to stop and look at hisself.
I feel like I should have seen it, too.
I was there, I should have thought, "There's...
There's no way.
There's no way you could be an accomplished surgeon."
Somebody should have done something.
It should have never come to this.
**
-After Kellie Martin's surgery, we're now into March of 2012.
Chris Duntsch is looking for a job elsewhere,
and he starts applying to hospitals around Dallas.
-He's telling his patients,
"Oh, we're gonna hold off on your surgery for a minute.
I'm busy."
-I remember Chris saying that someone had passed away
and that he wasn't exactly sure how.
And he had, you know, said maybe it was an allergic reaction
to something in the anesthesia.
I actually didn't know he was unemployed between hospitals.
I didn't really realize
there was a severance with Baylor
for quite some time.
He didn't want to talk about it and really didn't want
to clue me in, which was normal for him,
to want to keep me in the dark a lot.
He carried a lot of secrets.
-Did you have some sort of romantic or sexual relationship
at some point with Dr. Duntsch?
-We did date, sir.
-Where -- Where would you go
for entertainment or dates or whatever it was
y'all two would do with one another?
-Our office.
-Sorry?
-The office, because there was a couch in his office.
So we would sleep, sometimes fall asleep,
and then I'd go home and he would go home.
**
[ Cellphone chimes ]
-Are you saying you -- you would have dates in the office?
-Yeah, 'cause we were really busy.
-Okay. How many times did y'all have a date in the office?
-We probably tried to get together two times a week,
maybe three.
**
-Every event, every person that would ask,
I'm somebody else's girlfriend
or I'm just living there until my husband comes to get me.
I became his secret.
I became his problem.
The Chris that I knew could be angry
if I didn't bend to his will.
There'd been some domestic violence between him and I.
Once while I was pregnant,
which caused me to go to the antepartum unit.
He ripped my shirt, he pushed me against the wall.
He was supposed to have met Kim that evening,
and that was, like, our main issue.
There was an affair going on.
**
[ Cellphone chimes ]
I'm in too deep at this point,
totally dependent on him to eat,
and I was trying to find a way out.
But I'm just basically stuck in a situation now
that I never saw coming.
-When a person with a psychopathic
or sociopathic personality style is in a relationship,
we often see patterns like coercive control,
exploitation of a partner,
emotional, physical abuse of a partner.
-By the summer of 2012,
Duntsch no longer has a job at Baylor,
and he tries to find another job around Dallas.
And he eventually meets with Dallas Medical Center,
and they are looking for a neurosurgeon.
-Dallas Medical Center is a tier lower
than where he was coming from.
And when he meets with their CEO, he has a plan --
he wants to build this huge neurosurgical practice for them.
This is a hospital that really doesn't do neurosurgery.
They don't do brain surgery at all.
They do some spine surgery,
but this is a huge cash cow for them.
-Dallas Medical Center was struggling financially,
and it was a pretty sexy proposition.
-People talk, and so Dallas Medical Center
had an inkling of what happened at Baylor Plano,
and he'd had excuses for Jerry Summers'
and Kellie Martin's cases.
-Dallas Medical Center did check the National Data Bank
to see if Duntsch had any marks on his record, but he didn't
because he was allowed to resign from Baylor Plano.
Therefore they did allow him to practice at their hospital.
-Officially, his privileges are temporary, to operate,
because they haven't yet finished
the review of his credentials.
-Duntsch had cases, he could bring revenues
into Dallas Medical Center right away, so why not?
Why wait -- Let's give him temporary privileges.
**
-I first met Dr. Duntsch
the Monday morning of his first surgery
at Dallas Medical Center.
Seemed very intense, very aggressive.
Not in a mean way, but just very, very boisterous.
He definitely would let you know how great he was at what he did,
that maybe that he was even better
than anyone you'd met who'd done it before.
**
-The very first patient he operated on was Shirley Mock,
and that surgery didn't go well.
She ended up having to have it fixed.
She had loose hardware in her back,
but she was able to leave the hospital okay at that time.
-After Shirley Mock, he operates on Floella Brown.
-She was an older, sweet lady
who needed an issue in her neck fixed.
-The morning of Floella Brown's surgery
is when I noticed Dr. Duntsch is wearing the same scrubs
that he had been wearing the day before.
I noticed this because there's a --
about a nickel-sized hole in the butt of his scrubs.
He was not wearing underwear that morning
or the morning before.
Granted, he could have washed his scrubs overnight,
but there was a pretty good chance that he hadn't.
Neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons
are very big sticklers about sterility.
That's when your Spidey senses are going off and saying,
"Something might not be right here."
**
And when he'd look at you,
it was almost as if he was looking through you.
I had that feeling about some sort of drug use going on.
I mentioned my concerns to the -- to our charge nurse.
Charge nurse said, "Okay, noted," and, you know,
"let me know if you see anything else."
We started Floella Brown's surgery,
and within five minutes of that surgery starting,
Dr. Duntsch was complaining about he couldn't see
because there was too much blood.
-There is blood everywhere.
She's bleeding out of her neck.
It's gushing, it's pooling on the floor.
-You shouldn't be losing that much blood in a neck surgery.
There was something wrong with the bleeding.
This is cra-- I can't -- I've never seen this.
You know, is this guy insane?
-There's the obvious problem for the patient
losing that much blood volume,
but it's also a problem for the surgery itself,
because if you got blood pooling,
you're trying to operate on the --
in and around the spinal cord,
and you've got blood filling up in there,
you can't see what you're doing.
But that didn't seem to deter Dr. Duntsch.
**
[ Monitor beeping, ventilator hissing ]
-In Duntsch's story, there's a lot of second guessing
that goes on, with nurses saying,
"Oh, well, I would have reported him,
I would have reported him," but it's hard to tell,
like, in the moment, if you suspect --
you're not sure, because you're not a surgeon.
And in the operating room, the surgeon is king.
-It's not unlike the hierarchy in an airplane.
The captain is the captain is the captain.
But we're all in the operating room only for one reason,
and that's the patient's best interest.
That's our job, and that's the job of the nurses,
the doctors, the technicians.
When that doesn't happen, who suffers?
The patient.
-Floella Brown's surgery should have probably lasted
about two hours.
I know it went for four hours
because I was relieved by another nurse for lunch.
When I came back, they were all done.
She was already in recovery.
The nurse who had replaced me told me at that point,
"Hey, they pulled the drain."
That's a big deal because
if there is bleeding inside the neck,
they want to be able to drain that out as quickly as possible
so that a patient's not having trouble breathing.
Dr. Duntsch told everyone, "It will be fine,"
and just left it at that.
That really scared me.
That was when I spoke to the CEO
and said, you know, "Something's wrong.
I think that we need to have another surgeon watching him."
I was told at that point by the CEO,
"No," that, "we'll see how tomorrow goes."
-So that night, Duntsch leaves the hospital,
and Floella is not doing great.
In the evening, her husband kind of finds her.
She's not super responsive,
she's not able to speak with him,
but he leaves, and then the next morning, when he comes back,
he finds her, and she's completely unresponsive.
-It was a big concern to all of us, just knowing,
you know, what she had had done.
The drain thing starts worrying us.
Honestly, even to say it now gives me chills
thinking about it.
-And they begin trying to call Duntsch.
They are not able to get ahold of him
for about an hour and a half.
-The moment he walked in that morning,
I immediately got to him and said,
"Look, you need to call upstairs.
There's something wrong with your patient from yesterday."
It was at first met with -- it seemed like little concern,
almost that he was blowing it off.
He looked especially disheveled that morning.
Third day in a row,
was wearing the same pair of black scrubs
with the nickel-sized hole on his right ass cheek,
right above the pocket.
Definitely, it looked like it had been a rough night.
I knew he was on some sort of drugs.
-I never saw Chris with drugs --
not besides his prescription.
He was prescribed a stimulant
similar to Adderall.
And I did see him with his vodka.
-I think that drugs and alcohol
hindered Christopher Duntsch's cognitive abilities.
And I think it enhanced his belief that he was the best --
you know, his narcissism, his slight God complex.
I think that it made him think
that he could do whatever he wanted.
And you could start to see how his extracurricular activities
are seeping into his professional life.
**
-I wanted to clarify something.
Is that the kind of bottle Dr. Duntsch had --
had under his desk at Baylor Plano?
-It's been so long -- it looks similar,
but I can't be 100 percent sure.
-Did you ever see cocaine or white powder
in the office at Baylor Plano?
-We found a bag of white substance
in the patient bathroom at Baylor Plano.
-Did you open it up to see if it was cocaine?
-No, sir, we didn't touch it.
-Why didn't you touch it? -We didn't know what it was.
-So what did you do with the white powder
that was in the baggie?
-We flushed it in the toilet, sir.
-Why would you have flushed that down the toilet?
-Because we didn't know what it was.
Could have been Anthrax or...
-You put the -- the whole baggie in the toilet?
-Yes, sir. -Now, you weren't really
thinking it was Anthrax, were you?
-We don't know, sir. We don't know what it was.
**
-I don't know if it was combination
of mental illness and drugs and he was so out of it
and so delusional that he kept hurting people
and telling himself that he wasn't hurting people.
But it seemed to me that there were
a multitude of things going on.
**
-Duntsch is getting information from the hospital that,
"Hey, we need to give Floella Brown some care.
We need to save her life."
But, if you can believe it, things get worse.
[ Heartbeat echoing loudly ]
**
[ Cellphone chimes ]
**
-I take it, at some point, you terminated
the intimate relationship you had with Dr. Duntsch.
-Yes, sir. -When did that happen?
-After Mr. Summers' surgery, we really didn't see each other.
And he kept calling me, "Could you come back, please?
I just need someone to talk to.
We're going to get the business going again."
I was like, "Okay," and I just hung up, and I'm like, "Yeah."
And I met a guy I'd been talking to.
-Was it a romantic relationship, I guess?
-We were talking about dating, yes, sir.
-I see. And so you had this other fella,
and you decided to pursue that?
-Yes, sir. -Okay.
-Kimberly was seeing a few different people,
Chris found out about later.
Of course, right? What goes around comes around.
**
-Duntsch's third day at Dallas Medical Center,
he shows up late for surgery,
and Floella Brown is in grave danger
from her surgery the day before.
-On that third day, I do remember him disappearing
for a good 20 minutes.
We thought he was taking care of the situation
with Floella Brown,
but, actually, no one knows where he went,
because we found out once he did resurface
that morning that the floor still had not heard from him.
He came back with an intensity that, honestly,
I think he was probably
doing cocaine in the bathroom at that point.
-Duntsch finds Floella Brown in the ICU and orders some imaging,
but, basically, they know that she's having a stroke.
He decides that he's going to operate on a different patient.
Mary Efurd.
No one stops Duntsch from going into Mary Efurd's surgery
because the surgeon is the captain of the ship,
he gets to make the decisions,
and anyone else who's in the operating room,
they do what they're told.
-Well, the thing I remember about Mary is that
she could just have been anybody's grandmother --
just a sweet, older lady who had some really
run-of-the-mill back problems that she wanted to get fixed
so she could continue to enjoy an active lifestyle.
-There was no reason to have to do her surgery that day.
He had a patient dying in the ICU,
and he takes Mary Efurd in for an elective surgery.
-Mary has no idea what has gone on the day before
with Duntsch's other patient, Floella Brown,
and so she thinks everything is just going to be fine and dandy.
When he's in there, he does crazy things.
Things that should never happen.
-Mary Efurd's surgery was a spinal fusion.
When a doctor is doing a spinal fusion,
they're constantly taking X-rays.
They gotta make sure that it's going into the right spot,
going in the right angle.
Dr. Duntsch was placing screws into muscle.
-One doctor described it as
trying to put a screw into raw tuna.
You're just not going to get any sort of purchase from it.
-All of us in that room were saying,
"That's not even touching bone."
-They're telling him,
"You don't have the hardware in the right place."
They're trying to show it to him on the fluoroscopy.
He is yelling back at them, "I can see it with my eyes.
You can't see it," even though it's very obvious
that he's wrong.
-It was frustrating, but it was so confusing to all of us
because, looking at the pictures,
there's absolutely no way to confuse the two,
the muscle and the bone.
-I can hardly speak of it without just wanting to scream.
Even the least-experienced person in the operating room
with Mary Efurd could have looked up on the portable X-ray
and seen that the hardware
was being placed in the wrong position.
-He lost a screw in the soft tissue in the back,
and they couldn't find it, even with fluoroscopy.
-There's no way to describe this.
It's just somebody totally lost in space.
He had no idea of where he was or what he was doing.
-While Mary Efurd's surgery is going on,
he's also distracted by what's happening
with Floella Brown in the ICU.
-It was getting to a surreal moment.
Dr. Duntsch is in the middle of Mary Efurd's surgery,
and he wants to do a craniotomy on Ms. Brown.
Basically, he wanted to cut a hole in the back of her skull
to release some tension off of the brain.
-The hospital that he was in,
they didn't have the equipment to do that,
and he didn't have privileges to do that.
-I told him, "There's no way we can do that here.
If you need that done, we should transfer Ms. Brown out."
And he said, "I'll do it. You guys have what I need.
I can -- I can do it with what you have on hand."
I was not comfortable with that at all --
cutting into someone's skull with the wrong instruments.
It can get very dangerous.
At that point is when he started getting upset and yelling at me.
"I'm a doctor, you're a nurse, just do what I say."
And I told him, "When you hit gray matter in the brain,
it won't matter that you're the doctor and I'm the nurse,
you'll have killed the patient."
And he said, "Yeah, well, if you're not going to do that,
I want you to go get your boss and bring him in here."
I was -- I was more than happy to do that.
I said, "Okay, I'll be right back."
I got the medical director of the hospital,
Dr. Ippolito.
Dr. Ippolito entered the room
and started yelling right off the bat,
"You transfer that [bleep] patient to Parkland.
You're not doing a [bleep] craniotomy
here in this hospital."
-They are going back and forth, fighting about it.
Meanwhile, Floella Brown is dying
and not getting the care that she needs.
And Mary Efurd is sitting on the operating table wide open.
-After being yelled at by Dr. Ippolito,
Dr. Duntsch broke scrub and left the room.
**
All of us were just flabbergasted.
This guy's leaving this lady open
with a screw in the wrong spot.
None of us knew where he was.
What is going on?
-Duntsch was a runaway train...
and none of the brakes worked.
**
-Floella Brown is dying.
The course of action would have been for Duntsch
to send Floella to another hospital,
but he wouldn't do that, so she sat around
for hours in this state
before she could get the appropriate care
and he was willing to transfer her.
Ultimately, Duntsch's hand was forced,
and he had to transfer Floella Brown
to another hospital.
-After transferring Ms. Brown,
Dr. Duntsch came back into the OR
for Mary Efurd's surgery.
There was some renewed energy in him.
I think he's had more cocaine in the bathroom or something.
And he starts to go back to work.
His pace definitely picks up.
He pulled out the screw that had been sitting in muscle.
He kept on placing the screw and replacing it.
Everyone in that room was trying to help him.
Everyone in that room was saying,
"No, that's the wrong spot,"
"No, you gotta change that."
At that point, you should realize that,
"Hey, maybe I should listen
to all six voices telling me that I'm wrong."
-He won't listen to anyone.
To me, that's what represents
somebody who's just acting like a mad man.
**
-I've never seen a case
which should have been more straightforward
go so horribly wrong.
He seemed like he had an over-confidence
and it was boosted by drug use.
He just thought he couldn't be wrong.
-At some point, he throws his hands up in the air
like he's just made a touchdown, and says, "Tricortical."
-After Mary Efurd's surgery was done,
everyone in that room felt drained.
Dr. Duntsch walked out as if he had saved a life.
I was just happy to have him out of the room.
Before I was leaving for the day,
I did ask if we had heard anything back
about Floella Brown,
and we were told, "They believe she's brain dead."
It hits like a ton of bricks.
It should never have happened, you know?
-Was doing the Floella Brown case.
Dr. Duntsch injured the vertebral artery,
the big artery that supplies
the back of the brain with blood,
and so she had a massive stroke and herniated
and passed away the next morning.
-She was not getting enough blood to her brain
and ultimately died.
-The second procedure he did
at Dallas Medical Center,
he killed Floella Brown.
-He does the wrong operation at the wrong level,
the wrong way, and kills her doing it.
**
[ Siren wailing ]
-When Mary comes out of her surgery,
she's having issues right away --
however, Duntsch, of course, denies this.
He tells the CEO of the hospital,
"Yep, everything's fine. It went well.
And there were no problems."
When the CEO begins to look into it and hear from other staff
that there were issues, she goes herself down there
to evaluate Mary Efurd,
because she has some medical background,
and is able to very quickly determine
that there were some serious problems.
-Next morning, I was told,
"Did you hear Mary Efurd is paralyzed?"
-Floella Brown, Mary Efurd,
those cases should never have been performed.
They should never have been operated on.
Out of three cases that he did within a week,
he had two catastrophic results.
Christopher Duntsch should not have had a license
to practice medicine in Texas.
I mean, he was really maiming and killing people.
-Mary Efurd is paralyzed.
Floella Brown dies.
And we're not even halfway through his tenure in Dallas.
**
-Mary Efurd is in really bad shape in the hospital.
There's no way the hospital was going
to let Christopher Duntsch near her again.
She was never going to let Christopher Duntsch
near her again.
So the CEO calls in a doctor she trusts, Dr. Robert Henderson.
-Dr. Henderson was called in
to do an emergency re-operation.
-He is brought in, basically, to save Mary.
-Went up and evaluated Ms. Efurd.
She awoke and was alert and visibly uncomfortable
and stated she was in pain.
And was not able to move her legs.
I've looked at the imaging, and I can't hardly even believe
what I'm seeing on the imaging.
He never even operated on the disc itself,
which he was supposed to remove in its entirety.
It became apparent that this physician, Dr. Duntsch,
had no business being involved in her care at all.
-I had worked with Dr. Henderson before that plenty of times.
Wonderful surgeon.
I wanted to right a wrong that had happened,
so I volunteered.
-Henderson was brilliant.
And he filmed that disaster.
-He thought, "Nobody's going to believe me
when I tell them this," and so he brought in somebody
to actually record his surgery
as they were removing the hardware,
so that he could have proof
of what Christopher Duntsch had done.
He knew that there were going to be lawsuits about this.
-Okay, here we are on Mary Efurd.
This is the S1 screw.
There's bone fragments just laying over
the exposed dura here.
-I realized it was even worse than I thought.
It just blew everyone's mind.
-It looked like a bomb went off in there.
-This whole midline structure, which he tried to preserve,
is just flopping in here.
In my career, I've seen bad outcomes.
This was in another whole realm.
This is not providing any stability at all.
When I would touch those screws and rods, they just moved,
and then the screw at the bottom wasn't really even in bone.
So I'm going to remove the screw now.
-Okay.
-It was an atrocity.
Virtually everything was either not done
or done in the wrong place.
Anybody with any basic understanding of anatomy
wouldn't have done what he did.
-In my entire career, I haven't seen one doctor
with this many seriously bad complications,
and he managed to pull that off
in just three surgeries over the course of three days.
**
-The consistency of Duntsch's lack of remorse
is what we would see
in more of a psychopathic, sociopathic case.
-And Mary Efurd has limited paralysis.
The nerve roots atrophied and disappeared
and won't ever come back.
-These are such catastrophic events.
He's operating in areas he doesn't belong in.
No surgeon would ever even go to the places he went.
-It may be that he did not know how to do that operation.
-He walked into those ORs knowing what he didn't know.
-I doubted whether or not
Dr. Duntsch was a trained surgeon.
I doubted whether or not he was a physician, period.
-Robert Henderson couldn't imagine
how anyone who had been through any surgical training
could do a job this bad.
-I thought he was an imposter.
**
-Who is this guy?
**