Transplant surgeon acquitted in San Luis Obispo organ harvesting case
Hootan Roozrokh was accused of trying to hasten a patient's death to procure his organs. The case is believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S.
A San Luis Obispo jury today acquitted a transplant surgeon accused of trying to hasten a patient's death to procure his organs.
The case against Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, believed to the first of its kind in the United States, was watched intensely by doctors and other professionals involved in transplant surgeries. Experts feared that a conviction would turn away potential donors, their families and even some of the doctors who harvest organs.
During the two-month trial, Roozrokh was cast by prosecutors as a predator who crossed established ethical boundaries in a failed attempt to acquire organs from a dying 25-year-old patient.
The defense contended that Roozrokh did nothing illegal or improper -- and acted only with compassion toward Ruben Navarro, a comatose 70-pound man who suffered from a painful, wasting neurological disease.
Roozrokh was found not guilty of one charge of dependent adult abuse, a felony that carries a prison sentence of up to four years. Two other charges were dropped at a preliminary hearing earlier this year.
On the night of Feb. 3, 2006, Navarro was close to death at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. He had suffered a heart attack days earlier at a nearby care home. His mother, Rosa Navarro, had given permission for organ donation, and a team that included Roozrokh flew in from San Francisco on behalf of a regional transplant network.
Roozrokh, who had just completed a Stanford University fellowship months before, was to supervise what is known as a "donation after cardiac death," a procedure that had never been performed at the 165-bed hospital. At the time, Roozrokh was on the staff of Kaiser Permanente's since-shuttered kidney program.
In most transplants, surgery occurs only after a patient is declared brain-dead. In donations after cardiac death, a patient's brain is irreversibly damaged, though functioning minimally. The patient may die minutes -- or hours -- after life support is removed, but organs are only usable if they can be retrieved within 30 minutes after the machines are turned off.
According to prosecutors, Roozrokh ordered up excessive doses of the painkiller morphine and Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, so that Navarro would die within that crucial half-hour. As it turned out, he died eight hours later and Roozrokh did not remove any organs.
