Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's an Evil Surgeon - The Raynaldo Ortiz Story

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Raynaldo Rivera Ortiz Jr., a once-trusted anesthesiologist at a Dallas surgical center, was convicted of grotesquely betraying his medical oath by secretly injecting powerful drugs into bags of IV fluid meant to help patients, turning routine procedures into life-threatening crises.

So this doctor is so terrible at his job that he's going to poison other doctors' patients so that he doesn't look so bad. Now the doctor's name is Ronaldo, and Ronaldo is around 58 when all this starts, and he's living in Texas. Here's the thing about Ronaldo, though. He's actually a really terrible person. Like at one point, his neighbor, I guess, helped his girlfriend at the time leave him. So in retaliation, Ronaldo shoots at his neighbor's dog, with a pellet gun. Luckily the dog is okay. But here's the other thing about

Ronaldo. Not only is he a terrible guy, but he's also terrible at his job. He actually works as an anesthesiologist and one time he's at work and something goes wrong with one of his patients and they need CPR immediately. And Ronaldo just like doesn't do it. He's just like, no I'm good. He doesn't even put the incident into the patient's medical records. That's how little of a fucking he gives. So yeah, he's awful in a lot of ways. He has a history of doing all kinds of awful things, and so far he hasn't really gotten in any trouble for it. But in 2022, all that starts to change, because one day he's at work during a routine procedure on a patient, and he fails to maintain

the patient's airway, which is basically his job being an anesthesiologist. And so the patient stops breathing. And this is a huge screw-up on his part. And the surgical center he works for, that they can't let this slide. And they launch an investigation into him. And this is really scary for Ronaldo. I mean, he already has a prior disciplinary action on his record, and if they find him at fault for this, he could lose his medical license, which means his entire career would be over, and he ain't about to let that happen. So Ronaldo comes up with an in-indexamination. So Ronaldo comes up with an insane plan. He's going to make his coworkers look just as bad as him. I guess the logic is that if other doctors there start making mistakes during their surgeries too, then Ronaldo won't look like

the worst doctor there anymore. It's wild. So two days after he's told that his bosses at the surgical center are investigating him, he gets to work. So at the surgery center, there is a warming bin in one of the hallways. And there, there, keep a bunch of IV bags, heated, you know, in case a patient needs one, which means that any staff member can grab a bag from there at any time. So when no one is around, Ronaldo goes to the warming bin and he starts taking a few IV bags out at a time. And then he will inject them with a bunch of dangerous drugs, basically poison.

Then he'll put the bags back into the warmer for other doctors to unknowingly use. And here he is on security camera and you can see him opening the warming bin and messing around in there. I'm not sure what he's doing. But here's the thing. This evil plan actually works. And soon enough, a woman comes to the hospital for some kind of routine surgery and one of the staff, without realizing it, hooks her up to one of the tainted IV bags.

The next thing you know, her blood pressure spikes and she goes into cardiac arrest. Now, luckily, the doctors are able to perform a lot of the doctors. a life-saving procedure, and she survives. Regardless, Rinaldo is happy that his plan was successful. I mean, he got to cause chaos for the other doctors and make them look bad. So he wants to do it again. And so at one point, a different woman comes to the hospital to get a stomach surgery. And sure enough, one of the staff unknowingly hooks her up to one of the tainted IV bags,

and pretty quickly, like the woman before her, her blood pressure spikes and she goes into cardiac arrest. And ultimately, the doctors have to send her to the intensive care unit to make sure that, you know, she doesn't die. And so, Ronaldo keeps doing this again and again and again. And over the next several months, four patients suffer cardiac emergencies, and there are 13 other unexplained emergencies that Ronaldo likely had a part in. And all of this starts to make a lot of the doctors there look really bad. And of course, Ronaldo is super careful to make sure that none of these. IV bag issues ever happened during any of his surgeries, only during the other doctor's surgeries.

So, you know, he doesn't want to accidentally make himself look bad. Now, here's where the story gets kind of dark. Rinaldo works with a lot of other doctors. One of them is this woman, Dr. Melanie. And one day, Dr. Melanie is at work, and suddenly she isn't feeling so well. She's all dehydrated. So before she clocks out, she grabs a saline IV bag from the warming bin. and she takes it home with her to treat herself.

And this bag happens to be one of Rinaldo's poisoned bags. So she gets home and her husband helps her set up the bag and hook it up to her and whatnot. And then he leaves. Five minutes later, boom, Dr. Melanie's blood pressure spikes and she starts to feel severe pain in her arm and chest. So she immediately calls her husband on the phone to come back to her. By the time he gets there, she's in serious pain and she's scrubs. screaming at him to call an ambulance.

Then she collapses onto the floor. So husband panics and he starts doing CPR on her. But unfortunately, it's too late. Dr. Melanie dies. Paradei presents Ojo with Alergy and Picasson. Contra the gardener and the Gronaday extra-furted.

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So police start getting suspicious. Meanwhile, back at the hospital, doctors and staff keep using Rinaldo's contaminated IV bags. So cardiac emergencies continue to happen. At one point, an 18-year-old kid comes into the hospital for nose surgery, and so the doctors put him under

and he's getting the surgery. And at some point, they change out his IV bag, and of course, they unknowingly hook him up to one of Rinaldo's IV bags from the warming bin. And this 18-year-old immediately goes into cardiac arrest. And his doctor starts freaking out because this was supposed to be a simple two-hour surgery, and all of a sudden this kid is over here fighting for his life.

But then another doctor runs into the operating room. Like, I think there might be a problem with the IV bags. So change his IV bag. And so they do. They switch out the kid's IV bag with a different, non-contaminated one, and then boom, within a minute, the kid stabilizes. Then one of the doctors examines the IV bags closely, and they see that the one used when the kid was having,

the cardiac event has a tiny puncture hole in the plastic. And that is when they all realized that someone had been tampering with the bags. And so the surgical center reaches out to the FDA about all these unexplained cardiac emergencies that now they believe are from the tainted IV bags. And they also start reviewing security footage from around the place. And immediately on that footage, they see Rinaldo doing very suspect things in the warming. bin. And he's not even supposed to be stocking the IV bags in the warmer. Like other staff takes care of that. So the fact that he's even there is highly unusual. Anyway, of course, then they

test the IV bags and they find that they are full of that poison he put in there, which proves that they have in fact been tampered with. And pretty quickly, it's confirmed that Ronaldo is the guy who did it and that his antics led to 11 cardiac emergencies while he was there. And so FDA agents go and they find him and bam, they arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And ultimately, Ronaldo goes to trial and he's found guilty and he gets sentenced to 190 years in prison.