A Colorado plastic surgeon was found guilty of attempted manslaughter charges Wednesday after he waited over five hours to call the police when a teen patient, who later died, went into cardiac arrest on his operating table.
Dr. Geoffrey Kim, 54, was also convicted of obstructing telephone services for his failure to call the police when a 19-year-old woman’s heart stopped before a breast enhancement surgery.
The Arapahoe County jury spent five hours deliberating the case before it handed down the two guilty verdicts but acquitted Kim of the more serious charges, including manslaughter and negligent homicide, according to KDVR.
In August 2019, recent high school graduate Emmalyn Nguyen was set to undergo breast implant surgery, when she was administered anesthesia by nurse anesthetist Rex Meeker.
She was found unconscious 15 minutes later.
Staffers at the Colorado Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery performed CPR on the teen, but Kim didn’t allow them to call 911 for over five hours.
“They leave her on the operating table for 5½ hours and don’t call 911 for 5½ hours while Emmalyn’s mother sits in the waiting room unaware of what’s happening,” Nguyen’s lawyer David Woodruff told KDVR in 2022.
Nguyen was resuscitated on the operating table.
She developed severe, irreversible brain damage that put her in a coma and she required around-the-clock care due to the amount of time emergency service was withheld.
Nguyen spent 14 months at a nursing home in a coma, making slow progress before developing pneumonia and dying in October 2020.
An investigation into the botched surgery was opened shortly after Nguyen’s medical episode and dozens of interviews and search warrants were issued that lasted two years.
Kim turned himself in to the police in February 2022 and was initially charged with felony first-degree aggravated assault and felony criminally negligent homicide, a press release said.
Meeker also faced criminal charges for his role in Nguyen’s death, but the charges were dropped as the former anesthetist, who gave up his license, agreed to testify against Kim, the outlet reported.
He claimed Kim overruled everyone in the office about not calling 911.
“I told him (Kim) we should send her to the hospital and I added it’s standard operating procedure,” Meeker said during his testimony last week.
Kim’s lawyers alleged the five hours Nguyen was left without proper medical care wasn’t what killed her, but it was the anesthetics that were administered by Meeker, according to KDVR.
Both the plastic surgeon and nurse were ordered to pay $1 million to Nguyen’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Kim, who still has his license, faces anywhere from probation to three years in prison, with a sentencing date set for September 8.
