Originally published by KTVU.com and no longer available online.
LOS ANGELES — A surgeon with close ties to the Bay Area was charged Monday with prescribing excessive drugs to a comatose, disabled patient to hasten his death and harvest his organs for transplantation.
It’s the first such criminal case against a transplant doctor in the United States, the San Luis Obispo County district attorney’s office said.
Prosecutors said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of San Francisco, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and a sedative to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro, who died in 2006.
He was taken in a coma to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in 2006 after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest. Although Navarro was found to have irreversible brain damage and was kept on a respirator, he was not considered brain dead because he still had limited brain function.
The day before Navarro died, his family gave approval for a surgical team to recover his organs for donation, though the procedure never occurred because Navarro did not die within 30 minutes of being removed from life support. He died the next day.
Roozrokh, a surgeon at Kaiser Permanente’s now-closed kidney transplant program, was working at the time on behalf of a group that procures and distributes organs. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the drugs were prescribed “to accelerate Mr. Navarro’s death in order to recover his organs.”
State law prohibits transplant surgeons to be involved in the treatment of potential organ donors before they are declared dead.
Roozrokh’s lawyer, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, called the charges “unfounded and ill-advised,” saying his client “has unfairly been the subject of an 18-month witch hunt.”
“Nothing that Dr. Roozrokh did or said at the hospital that night adversely affected the quality of Mr. Navarro’s life or contributed to Mr. Navarro’s eventual death,” Schwartzbach said in a statement.
Prosecutors did not pursue murder charges because witnesses said they did not believe the drugs caused Navarro’s death.
“The central issue of this case is the mistreatment of a developmentally disabled, dependent adult in an attempt to hasten the person’s death for organ transplantation,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephen Brown said in an interview.
The coroner’s office this year determined that Navarro died of natural causes. Last month, his mother, Rosa, filed a wrongful-death and medical malpractice lawsuit against Roozrokh and others, claiming her son was removed from life support without her permission and given lethal doses of drugs.
Navarro, who weighed about 80 pounds, was born with a neurological disorder known as adrenoleukodystrophy. He also had celebral palsy and seizures. Navarro lived in a home for mentally and physically challenged adults in the year before his death.
A report from federal regulators said Roozrokh ordered Navarro to receive 200 milligrams of morphine and 80 milligrams of the sedative Ativan — far in excess of the usual doses.
Roozrokh was also accused of prescribing excessive morphine and administering the topical antiseptic Betadine into Navarro’s stomach.
Roozrokh, a U.S. citizen, was born in Iran and emigrated with his family at age 2. He was charged with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and unlawful controlled substance prescription. If convicted of all three counts, he faces up to eight years in state prison or up to one year in jail and a $20,000 fine as a condition of probation.
Sierra Vista hospital officials began investigating when nurses alerted their bosses after Navarro’s death. A spokesman has said the hospital has since strengthened its organ donation procedures.
Previously:
This is the kinda of publicity that is hurting Kaiser’s chance with it’s lawsuit the many who have been hurt by Kaiser’s so-called transplant dept. Last week the $3 million fine brought to by DHMC, When will everyone understand the terrible tragedy this HMO has done. When its your husband, wife, and your precious children. When?
This sounds like murder to me. What’s not to understand about that?
Oh, yes I’ve forgotten, Kaiser can get away with murder because the system allows it.
This is the same Dr. Roozrokh who looked my husband and I in the eye in April 2006, and told him he was next on “the plate” after waiting since 1/2000 for a kidney. He said my husband would definitely have his kidney within two months.
Flash forward, our lawyer received my husbands UNOS listing. The Kaiser Transplant Center refused two kidneys for my husband that UNOS offered one in May 2006, and another in July 2006. The reason that was noted on the UNOS listing was that the “patient no longer interested”.
Since this very so-called Doctor was the one in charge of the Transplant Center, he (or someone just as morally corrupt) lied to UNOS twice. What a GOD complex.
As of now we are no longer Kaiser members, & suing.
May this Doctor rot in hell.
It’s hard to imagine that such evil exists in the world.
Marianne, I am so very sorry to hear what was done to your husband and yourself.
It *is* hard to believe that this type of evil exists in this world.
After being a victim of Kaiser and their refusal of needed/required medical care that brought my life to a halt, I look back and see how evil seems to permeate in that ‘network’ of Physicians….
The good Physicians who go and work for Kaiser eventually leave (and quickly) after they see the underlying focus on money versus quality of care…..this means that the ones who remain are the ones that are able to to be manipulated (or brainwashed) by the Kaiser System….the Stepford Physicians….
I too left the ‘network’ of Stepford Physicians and found ones that do follow the Hippocratic Oath (to do no harm) as well as the Golden Rule of “Do un to others as you would have them do un to you” I was becoming sicker and sicker…..
I wish you all the best in your lawsuit against not only Kaiser but also against the Physician who wrote these false statements in his notes.
I got a copy of my chart and was appalled to see the lies written in there by two “Physicians” inparticular (and another wrote misleading statements to make herself look good. She had refused care for three years, refused a specialist referral–until I called a second time on her and complained to customer service about her continued refusal to see a specialist, the first complaint went undocumented and not followed up on.
In my last meeting with this “Doctor” I told her I decided to go and get treatment outside of the Kaiser “network. She ‘requested’ the Doctors name of who I was going to see(not once, but three times. Obviously, I refused to give the name. Her face contorted and she made more demeaning statements to me about being “paranoid” and “obsessed”….of course the fact she refused medical care for three years did not get in to her notes. Interestingly enough, when she found out I was going outside of the “network” suddenly she “offered” treatment. The part, about her offering treatment and my now refusal made it in her notes. What didn’t make it in is that she refused teatment for three years, the medical complaints I voiced were not fully documented (probably because they pointed to exactly the medical issue I had and had been begging for treatment for all those years). Her belittling statments to me of being “Paranoid” and “Obsessed” did not make it in her notes either….nor did the fact that I refused treatment then by her because of the loss of trust in her or her knowledge base.
Disgusting!!!
Good for you for filing a lawsuit…..as Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing.”……
that roozrokh guy seems to think he is an
internationally famous surgeon, but he’s nothing
more than a lightweight murderer. the hilarious
thing is the director of transplant martinez
never had any organ transplant experience!!!!!
Unbelieveable!!!!! the persian only participated
in one prior transplant, probably as an observer.
They both were learning major organ surgery
without any solid experience, just because
they want to cut up organs, doesn’t mean the
US government should allow them to. Let the
criminal and civil charges proceed and escalate.
Kaiser is more interested in making money then curing people. I’m a fat pig, I know it, but my Kaiser so called doctor instead of telling me to lose weight says I “wear my weight well” W.T.F.! Just one example of how Kaiser wants us dugged up and f@@@ed up so we spend more money with them.