Transcript of FOUND FOOTAGE: Mortality Mystery Finally Explained

Today's video is about a medical mystery that ultimately gets solved when somebody uncovers some very unsettling security footage that we will play at the end of this video. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please invite the like button to come over to your nice, calm, backyard barbecue, but be sure to replace their hot dog with a lit stick of dynamite. Also, Please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story. On May 27, 2022, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Chad Marsden stood inside of an room with a nurse, a surgeon, and their unconscious patient. Dr. Marsden worked at the Baylor Scott and White Surgicare Center in Dallas, Texas, and it was his job to make sure patients stayed asleep during surgery and then woke up safely afterward. That day, Dr. Marsden and his colleagues were wrapping up a routine liposuction procedure on a middle-aged woman.

The surgeon had just finished stitching up the woman's incisions, and so Dr. Marsden, following protocol, began taking her slowly off of anesthesia to wake her back up again. And so Dr. Marsden turned off the anesthesia machine, which is this big rectangular device that takes the liquid anesthesia drugs and converts it into a vapor, so it can be breathed in. And then Dr. Marsden removed the breathing mask from the woman's face. Then he changed her IV from an anesthetic drug mixture to regular saline. And so now that these drugs were not being pumped into her system, she would wake up over the next half hour or so. After that, Dr. Marsden and the nurse and the surgeon took their patient on the stretcher, and they pushed her out of the OR into the hallway and began making their way down towards the recovery room. But as they were walking down this hallway, they bumped into more of their colleagues, another nurse and another anesthesiologist, and the hallway was tight enough that Dr. Marsden had to step aside to let these two pass. Then after they did, and they waved at their colleagues, Marsden, the nurse and the surgeon continued walking.

As they did, Marsden happened to look down at their patient, and immediately he knew something was wrong. This woman's skin had turned completely gray. Dr. Marsden was totally caught off guard by this. He looked at her vital sign monitor and saw that her blood pressure, which just moments ago had been normal, was now dangerously high. And then as he's staring at her monitor, her blood pressure plummeted. And then also her oxygen levels fell, and then she began foaming at the mouth. It was clear this woman was going into cardiac arrest, which meant if they didn't act quickly, her heart was going to stop. Now, Dr. Marsden, again, is in shock at how quickly this is happening, but he just jumped into protocol. He began giving the woman chest compressions to make sure blood was flowing to her heart. Meanwhile, the surgeon administered oxygen and blood pressure medication, and the nurse called for an ambulance. The reason she had to call for an ambulance is because the Surgicare Center was not equipped to handle medical emergencies. It was only for scheduled surgeries. If there was a medical emergency, all they could do was just stabilize the patient until paramedics arrived.

That's exactly what Dr. Mars Marsden, the nurse, and the surgeon did. They got this woman stable, and then just a minute later, two paramedics came running down the hallway. They took possession of the patient. They put her onto their stretcher. Out the door, they went. They put her in the back of the ambulance, and they sped off to the local hospital. As Dr. Marsden watched the ambulance disappear down the road, he knew his patient was now in good hands, but he was still very shaken by the whole experience. Because this type of emergency, somebody going into unexplained sudden cardiac arrest following a totally routine surgery was extremely rare. Meaning for this to happen even just once over the course of somebody's medical career, to have witnessed something like that, was very rare. But for Dr. Marsden, this was not the first time he had seen this. In fact, literally the day before, a different patient at the Surgicare Center had also gone into sudden unexplained cardiac arrest following their routine procedure. So as Dr. Marsden went back inside and began heading upstairs to the hospital administrator's office, to tell them about this latest emergency, he kept thinking to himself how crazy it was that he had just witnessed these two unexplained sudden cardiac arrests basically back to back.

But Dr. Marsden just thought to himself, Hopefully, this is just a really bad It's not a coincidence. The Surgicare Center's administrator was a woman named Ashley Birks. When she heard about this second unexplained cardiac arrest, she knew she had to call a staff meeting. That evening, she, along with Dr. Marsden and over two dozen other medical staff, doctors, nurses, other anesthesiologists, they met in this conference room in the back of the building. Once everybody was assembled, Ashley began by updating everyone on the two patients who had been rushed off to the hospital for their cardiac emergencies. She said they had stabilized and they'd be okay. But Ashley then said what everybody in the room was thinking, which is sudden, unexplained cardiac arrest is so rare. We can't just treat these things like coincidence, like something specifically must have caused caused these incidents, and we need to figure out what that thing was. Now, it was possible that the cause or causes behind these incidents were quite simple. Ashley said to the group, the first thing she did was she looked at the two patients' files to see if they had specific drug allergies or medical risk factors that might have been overlooked by staff.

But when she looked at their files, neither patient had those risk factors or allergies, so that couldn't have been it. Ashley said she also looked for just a common thread between these two incidents. Were the patients doing something similar? Were they in for similar reasons? Were they in the same room? But no, they were in different operating rooms, going through different procedures with different medical teams. And so there was no obvious common thread between the two incidents. Ashley said to the group that the only reasonable explanation that she could think of, at least at this point, was that perhaps the equipment in the surgical care center had malfunctioned. What she was going to do, out of an abundance of caution, was just begin testing all of the equipment in the building. And so Ashley told the group that in the meantime, while she was doing that, the rest of the staff should be extra attentive to their patients and also be on the lookout for potential problems with hospital equipment. Ashley watched the medical staff all nod their heads in agreement and begin talking to each other, and then she thanked them all for being there and told them they could leave.

Three weeks later, on the afternoon of June 22nd, Ashley stood outside the OR in the hallway looking through a cabinet that contained surgical drugs. Ashley was still trying to find a connection between those two sudden cardiac arrests. She'd already checked all the Surgicare Centre's equipment, from the anesthesia machines to the vital sign monitors to the breathing tubes, and everything was in perfect working condition. Now, checking these drugs inside of this cabinet was her last resort. She'd printed out a list of recent drug recalls and was now comparing that list against all of the drugs inside of this cabinet. One by one, she was reading a drug and checking the date on it and comparing it with her list to make sure they were not carrying recall drugs still. But after going through dozens and dozens of bottles, there was nothing in their cabinet that was on the recall list. Ashley still just did not have an answer for why those two cardiac emergencies had happened. However, since that staff meeting three weeks earlier, the Surgicare Center had not had another cardiac emergency. Ashley was thinking to herself, maybe despite not knowing how this happened, these troubles are in the past.

Ashley She got the drug cabinet and walked down the hallway towards the break room to grab her lunch. But the moment she walked inside, she saw a group of her colleagues sitting around a table looking very upset. In fact, some people were visibly crying. And so Ashley walked up to them and said, Hey, what's going on? And a nurse told her that one of their colleagues, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Melanie Kaspar, was dead. Apparently, the night before, she had had a heart attack at her home, and her husband had found her and called 911. But unfortunately, by the time paramedics arrived, she was already deceased. Ashley was shocked. She knew Dr. Kaspar, and she knew she was in great shape. She was only in her mid-fifties. I mean, she did not seem like someone who might just randomly have a heart attack. But then also Ashley began to think that she remembered hearing in the last few days that Dr. Gaspar had actually been feeling sick. She wondered if maybe whatever illness she was suffering from had something to do with her heart attack. Either way, as the surgical care administrator, it was Ashley's job to plan staff events like Memorial services.

And so Ashley told the group like, Hey, I'll get to work putting together a small ceremony for Dr. Gaspar. Five days later, on June 27th, Ashley was sitting in front of her office computer ordering supplies for Dr. Gaspar's Memorial, when suddenly she heard these loud, fast footsteps out in the hall as if somebody was sprinting towards her office. And then a moment later, Ashley saw her door burst open, and the anesthesiologist, Dr. Chad Marsden, was standing there, and he looked absolutely horrified, and he just said to her, It's happening again. Ashley's stomach dropped, and she jumped up and sprinted after Dr. Marsden, and they made their way to the hallway outside of the OR. When they got there, Ashley immediately heard the sound of that long single beep of somebody's heart monitor flatlining, and she looked over and she saw one of the doors to an operating room was open, and inside, she saw a surgeon performing chest compressions on an elderly patient. Even from out in the hall, Ashley could tell this man was unconscious, his skin was gray, and he was foaming at the mouth. It was exactly like the other cardiac emergencies that had happened before, except this time was worse because that beep, that flatlining beep, meant that this man's heart had actually stopped.

And so Ashley just stood there in horror, watching the surgeon perform these chest compressions, knowing that if that didn't work, if they couldn't get this man's heart started again, he was about to die. Just then, Ashley heard the sound of the doors leading into the OR hallway open, and these two paramedics came rushing inside. Right as they passed her and got to the doorway leading in to where this man was basically dying, Ashley heard the sound of the flatline beep turn into regular beeping, which meant the surgeon who was doing chest compressions had managed to restart this man's heart. And so Ashley was relieved, but by no means thought, They're out of the woods yet. I mean, this man clearly is going through a medical emergency here. But the paramedics got the man off the OR table, they put him on a stretcher, and they wheeled them away. And so once they were gone, Ashley, Dr. Marsden, and the surgeon who had been doing the chest compressions, they all just looked at each other like, What is going on here? Clearly, there is something causing all these sudden cardiac arrests, but still, nobody knew what it was.

Ashley just stood there for a moment, feeling absolutely sick to her stomach. If it wasn't the drugs, and if it wasn't the medical equipment that caused these sudden cardiac arrests, then what was it? Well, Ashley was determined to find out. Just a reminder, my very first book, Mr. Ballon presents, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious: The Graphic Stories is out right now and shipping worldwide. You can find it wherever books or audiobooks are sold. This book is truly a brand new experience for anybody who's a fan of The Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. We've never had a book before, so this is a big deal. It's a collection collection of nine stories. Some are new, some are old, but they're all awesome. The artwork is incredible. The storytelling is just superb. So if you have not purchased your copy yet or you haven't bought it for one of your friends yet, come on, go to book. Ballinstudios. Com or go to wherever books are sold and get a copy today. Again, that is book. Ballinstudios. Com or go to wherever books or audiobooks are sold to get your copy of our first book today. Over the next two months, Ashley interviewed and observed every single employee of the Search Care Center to make sure they really were following their protocol absolutely to a T.

And one after another, through her research, she discovered that they all were. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. So the cardiac arrests could not be chalked up to faulty equipment, recall drugs, or human error. And yet the cardiac emergencies kept on happening at the Surgicare Center. There were three incidents in July and four more incidents in the first three weeks of August. And so in total, that made 10 patients at the Surgicare Center who had all gone in to sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. Now, none of them had died, but Ashley knew a few of them had been left with permanent heart damage. People were getting seriously injured on her watch, and she felt like she can't figure out what's going on here. And so it's just a matter of time until somebody does die from one of these cardiac emergencies. And so she was feeling completely overwhelmed and stressed out and desperate until August 24th, when two things happened in quick succession. First, In the morning of August 24th, Ashley received a phone call from an officer at the Dallas Police Department, and they told her that the autopsy had been completed on Dr. Melanie Kaspar, the anesthesiologist who had died back in June from a heart attack at her home.

This police officer thought that Ashley really needed to know that her heart attack had not been natural. It was actually caused by an overdose of a drug called Bupivacaine. Ashley knew what Bupivacaine was. It was a drug that was basically only used in surgical anesthesia. But Ashley had never heard of anybody abusing this drug or overdosing on it because Bupivacaine does not make you high, like morphine or fentanyl does. It's closer to novacaine. It's like a numbing agent. Ashley told the officer how weird it the idea that she had died of an overdose of Bupivacaine, of all drugs, and the officer agreed with her. But regardless, he thought Ashley should know because he thought it was possible that Dr. Gaspar had gotten the Bupivacaine from the Surgicare Center. And so feeling totally confused, Ashley thanked the officer for telling her. Then they hung up, and then Ashley walked to the OR hallway to check the drug cabinet where drugs like Bupivacaine were stored. But as soon as she entered that hallway, the second thing happened that day. Ashley heard chaos break out inside of an operating room where she knew an 18-year-old boy was undergoing what should have been a routine sinus surgery.

And so she watched helplessly as the doors flung open and a nurse came running out into the hall to call an ambulance. And then inside the room, Ashley saw an anesthesiologist performing chest compressions on this boy, and another doctor was administering oxygen and blood pressure medication. It was the same nightmare playing out now for an 11th time. But this time, after the EMTs wheeled this boy away to be driven off to the local hospital, Ashley was so desperate to figure out what was going on here that she just couldn't wait. And so she rounded up a couple of hospital staffers that were nearby, and they went into that operating room, and they checked the medical equipment, they checked the drugs that had been used, they searched the floor for anything that might have had something to do with this. I mean, they even searched the trash can. And in the trash, Ashley found something that the second she saw it, it made her blood run cold. She couldn't believe somebody would do something this awful or why they would do this. And so she took the thing she found in the trash, and she ran out of the operating room and upstairs to call the police.

Minutes later, two police officers arrived at the S urge care center, and they saw what Ashley had found in the trash. When they looked at it, they knew they had a very serious situation on their hands. So right away, they roped off the operating room where this 18-year-old boy had been, and they began looking evidence inside of there. Then also, they began reviewing the security camera footage from the OR hallway. As they reviewed this footage, they would find something truly chilling going on in that hallway that totally explained all of the sudden cardiac arrests that had been happening inside the surgical care center. This is what they saw on the clearest piece of footage, which was shot five days earlier on August 19th. A hospital employee is seen walking down the OR hallway carrying a stack of papers under his arm. He walks past a couple of his colleagues, and he arrives in front of this big metallic device that looks like a refrigerator, and he opens it up, and he reaches inside, and he pulls out a saline IV bag. Now, when he does this, Nobody else in the hallway bats an eye because this is a totally normal thing to do.

That metal device was a warming machine where saline IV bags were stored to be used during or after surgeries. At any given point, this warmer would contain a few dozen IV bags, and whenever it got low, certain staff members would restock it. But the police watched this footage over and over again, and they saw this employee who walks up to the warmer was not just carrying a stack of papers. He was also hiding something within those papers, his own Saline IV bag. And so before this man takes out an IV bag from the warmer, he takes this hidden one and places it in the warmer as well. So he's basically swapped one for one. And This was absolutely bizarre because it was not his job to be restocking the warmer. He shouldn't have been putting anything inside of the warmer. And so about 30 minutes after this employee has placed his own IV bag inside of the warmer, a nurse comes out of the OR, walks down the hallway, opens up the warmer, takes one of the warmed up IV bags, carries it down the hall, goes back into the OR, and minutes later, her patient goes into cardiac arrest.

It would turn out that nurse had inadvertently grabbed the Saline bag that the male employee had secretly placed just minutes before, and she didn't know that that Saline bag is what caused the cardiac arrest. Nobody knew until days later when Ashley is so desperate to figure out why all these patients are going into cardiac arrest that she began searching through the trash, and she would find an empty IV bag, and she would see very clearly there was a little puncture on it, just big enough for a needle. And so after seeing this security footage, the police analyzed that empty IV bag that Ashley had found in the trash with the puncture on it to see exactly what was in that IV that went into the 18-year-old who also went into cardiac arrest. And inside, they found a combination of three drugs that, when combined, are like a biological bomb that will send somebody into cardiac arrest within minutes. They were lidocaine, which is an anesthetic, epinephrine, which is basically pure adrenaline. And crucially, the third drug found was pupivacaine, the anesthetic that Dr. Melanie Kaspar had overdosed on, which caused her to die of a heart attack.

And this discovery meant that Dr. Kaspar's death was almost certainly connected to these poisoned IV bags. In the few days before Dr. Kaspar's death, she had been feeling sick and dehydrated. And on the day of her death, she was feeling so unwell at work that unbeknownst to any of her colleagues, she had taken a saline IV bag from that warmer and brought it home with her to rehydrate herself. But unfortunately, the one that she grabbed was one of the poisoned ones. When paramedics arrived at Dr. Gaspar's home, they found her still with the IV needle in her arm. But at the time, nobody connected her death with all of the cardiac emergencies at the Surgicare Center. Well, nobody except for the employee who was actually poisoning the IV bags. That employee was an anesthesiologist, but it was not Dr. Chad Marsden. It was the person that Dr. Marsden had to get out of the way for in the hallway that first time his patient had gone into cardiac arrest. The man who was doing the tampering was Dr. Reinaldo Ortiz. He was 58 years old, and he had only worked at the Surgicare Center for about a year.

He had flown mostly under the radar there until May 19th of 2022, which was about a week before the sudden unexplained cardiac arrests had begun at the Surgicare Center. On that day, on May 19th, Dr. Ortiz had allowed one of his patients to stop breathing, nearly killing the patient. As a result of that incident, Dr. Ortiz had been placed under internal investigation by the Surgicare Center, and he was facing the possibility of losing his medical license because of negligence. To try to avoid losing his medical license, Dr. Ortiz decided he would just try to make all the other doctors look negligent, too, taking the attention off of himself. He began sabotaging his colleagues' surgeries by injecting those drugs into their patient's IV bags, knowing it would cause cardiac arrest. Now, none of the patients who went into cardiac arrest at the Surgicare Center died. However, Dr. Gaspar, who took that tampered IV bag home with her, did die. And so ultimately, Dr. Ortiz was responsible for her death. In April of 2024, Dr. Ortiz was found guilty on multiple charges, and he is currently facing a sentence of up to 190 years in prison.

If you don't know this, late last year, we launched a brand new, Strange, dark, and mysterious show called Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries. And so far, people love it. It is a free weekly show where each week we explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies. Topics discussed on the show range from obscure diseases and freak occurrences to totally weird medical mishaps that sometimes result in big, amazing discoveries and other times result in just unimaginable suffering and death. So if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious, then you really ought to give Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries a try. To start listening, go look up and follow Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries on any podcast platform, and boom, you're in. You got yourself a new weekly show. But if you're super impatient patient like I am, and you can't wait a whole week to get a new episode, well, with your prime membership, you can listen to an entire batch of eight episodes at once because we release them eight at a time on Amazon Music. Also on Amazon Music, there are no ads. And if all this was not enough to sell you on maybe giving the show a try, I'll play you a sneak peek from our newest episode of Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries.

Enjoy.

A man in his 40s was sitting in a cafe, munching on a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. Now, usually, the man had more lavish lunches, but today, he was in a hurry to get back to work, and this was all the cafe offered. But then, the most wonderful smell filled the air. The man inhaled deeply, enjoying the heavenly aroma of whatever this food was. It smelled like this incredible hot dish. He looked around to see which table the smell was coming from. But as he scanned the restaurant, all he saw were other patrons eating basically simple sandwiches just like him. And then he remembered this cafe didn't He didn't even serve hot meals. But at the same time, he realized he knew that scent from his childhood. It was the smell of the delicious Spanish fried eggs that his mother used to make called huevos rotos. This was not the man's first phantom smell. A few weeks ago, his apartment had filled with the amazing aroma of his mother's cooking completely out of nowhere. But now in this cafe, just like that time in his apartment, the sweet smell suddenly turns sour. The man could taste something metallic in his mouth, and the foul odor of sour milk lingered in the air, making him gag.

And so suddenly a wave of panic crept over the man. He didn't know why he kept smelling things that weren't there.