Plano Neurosurgeon Facing Life in Prison

A Plano, Texas, neurosurgeon has been sentenced to life in prison as a result of operating room conduct that resulted in the deaths of two patients and multiple cases in which his patients became paralyzed after his surgeries were performed. In a harrowing story published in November 2016, D Magazine profiled the troubles of Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a physician that the magazine dubbed “Dr. Death.”

Around that same time, Duntsch’s behavior was becoming erratic. During a deposition with Passmore’s lawyer, attorney James Girards, a woman named Megan Kane recalls Duntsch eating a paper blotter of LSD and taking prescription painkillers on his birthday in either 2006 or 2007. She also says they snorted cocaine from a small pile that he kept on a dresser in his home office. Also present, according to Kane, was Jerry Summers, the childhood friend who would later wake up a quadriplegic after a Duntsch operation. Kane dated Summers for a year. After they all partied through the night, powered by LSD and cocaine, she said she saw Duntsch put on his lab coat to make rounds the next morning.

“I thought it was pretty amazing that he was even able to go to work the next day,” she said in the deposition. “Like, he wasn’t scared. He didn’t not want to. He wasn’t paranoid. After you’ve spent a night using cocaine, most people become paranoid and want to stay in the house. They don’t want to go participate in any extraneous activities, and he was totally fine going to work.”

Last week, a Dallas County jury convicted Duntsch of a first-degree felony, injury to an elderly person. This week, the same jury handed down its life sentence recommendation.

The Texas Medical Board revoked Duntsch’s medical license in December 2013 after it found that he had a pattern of failing to follow proper procedures before operations or respond to complications that caused at least two deaths.