[4] Duntsch appeared extremely qualified on paper: he had spent fifteen years in training (medical school, residency and fellowship), and his curriculum vitae was twelve single-spaced pages.
Had Duntsch been fired, Baylor Plano would have been required to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which is intended to flag problematic physicians.
[2][4][19][7] Duntsch moved to the Dallas Medical Center in Farmers Branch, where he was granted temporary privileges until hospital officials could obtain his records from Baylor Plano.
[7] He lasted for less than a week before administrators pulled his privileges after the death of a patient, Floella Brown, and the maiming of another, Mary Efurd.
[23][19][24] While performing a spinal fusion on Efurd, Duntsch severed one of her nerve roots while operating on the wrong portion of her back, twisted a screw into another nerve, left screw holes on the opposite side of her spine, failed to remove the disc he was supposed to remove, and left surgical hardware in her muscle tissue so loose that it moved when touched.
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.
Several people in the operating room for Efurd's surgery suspected Duntsch might have been intoxicated, recalling that his pupils were dilated.
He later recalled that in his view, anyone with a basic knowledge of human anatomy would know that he was operating in the wrong area of Efurd's back.
After undergoing physical rehabilitation, Mayfield was able to walk with a cane but continued to experience paralysis on the right side of his body and in his left arm.
[27] While attempting to remove degenerated discs in Marshall "Tex" Muse's back, Duntsch left surgical hardware floating between the spine and muscle tissue.
Troy was left barely able to speak above a whisper, had to be sedated for weeks and had to be fed through a feeding tube for some time as food was entering her lungs.
[9][24][19][7] After several days, surgeon Randall Kirby was brought in to repair the damage and later described what he found after opening Glidewell back up as the work of a "crazed maniac".
[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.
Glidewell was reportedly still suffering the ill effects of Duntsch's operation years later and has undergone more than fifty procedures to correct the damage.
The lead investigator on the case later revealed that she wanted Duntsch's license suspended while the ten-month probe was underway, but board attorneys were unwilling to agree.
[29] Then-Texas Attorney General (later Governor) Greg Abbott filed a motion to intervene in the suits to defend Baylor Plano, citing the 2003 Texas statute that capped civil damages for medical malpractice at $250,000 and removed the term "gross negligence" from the legal definition of malice.
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.
After interviewing dozens of his patients and their survivors, prosecutors concluded that Duntsch's actions were indeed criminal, and nothing short of imprisonment would prevent him from practicing medicine again.
[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.
As the trial team put it, the "scary pattern" of Duntsch's actions became apparent to others in the office, leading the DA to give the green light to take the case to a grand jury.
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.
[7] Shughart argued that Duntsch should have known he was likely to 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.
They argued that Duntsch was motivated to continue operating because the lucrative salary of a neurosurgeon would solve his mounting financial problems.
According to his lawyers, Duntsch did not realize how poorly he had performed as a surgeon until he heard the prosecution experts tell the jury about his many blunders in the operating room.
Even with credit for time served in the Dallas County jail before trial, he is not eligible for parole until July 2045, when he will be 74 years old.
[44] The Dallas County district attorney's office called it "a historic case with respect to prosecuting a doctor who had done wrong during surgery.
"[38] Testifying for the defense, UT Southwestern director of neurosurgery Carlos Bagley said that "the only way this happens is that the entire system fails the patients.
It stars Joshua Jackson as Duntsch, Alec Baldwin as Robert Henderson, Christian Slater as Randall Kirby, and AnnaSophia Robb as Michelle Shughart.
[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.