Douglas County DA reopens murder investigation into baby’s death by natural causes | Opinion

Whenever I get to thinking I’ve seen every single shameless thing an elected official can do to betray the public trust, I am once again proven wrong, in this case by Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez.

What has she done now, you ask? Never content to coast on her past errors of judgment, Valdez has topped herself again by reopening — or more likely, only pretending to reopen — her office’s investigation into the 2016 death of 9-month-old Ollie Ortiz.

Why would she do that, after dismissing the case when her own expert found that the child had died of natural causes, as the result of a congenital heart defect?

Valdez’s office did not respond to my message asking about her decision. Her attorney, Holly Dyer, said in a recent filing that the case had been reopened because there’s new evidence. “The District Attorney’s Office considers the matter of this child’s tragic death to be an open investigation with the potential for new charges.”

I’m beyond skeptical about that potential.

“They don’t have any new evidence because there isn’t any,” Carrody Buchhorn, the former Eudora day care worker found guilty of first-degree murder in the baby’s death, told me. “But they didn’t have anything last time, either.”

Buchhorn has filed a wrongful conviction suit against the state, and her attorney, William Skepnek, told me that Dyer said twice in a hearing last week that the case had been reopened in response to that suit.

“When I heard that in court last week,” that the investigation had been reopened, he said, “I didn’t think, ‘Oh gosh, now Carrody is in jeopardy.’ They’re gaming the thing. I don’t think they have any intention of prosecuting her.”

Instead, Skepnek said, they’re reopening the case simply “to deny her claim” of innocence, and to avoid answering those questions about the case that they might be able to duck if the investigation were ongoing.

Conviction overturned, dubious medical expert

That the child’s death was tragic is of course beyond question, which only makes the likelihood that this is some kind of strategic charade even more appalling.

Valdez and her deputy, Joshua Seiden, will still have to give depositions in the wrongful conviction case in May, but only after the judge rules on the scope of what can be asked about an active investigation.

Buchhorn’s 2018 conviction was overturned on appeal in 2021 because her original defense attorneys, former Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison and Veronica Dersch, did not more energetically challenge the key testimony of controversial medical examiner Erik K. Mitchell.

Mitchell invented a cause of death for Ortiz, “depolarization of neurons in the base of the brain,” that no one else had ever heard of. And when he demonstrated for the jury how Buchhorn must have stomped on the baby’s head by hopping on a demonstration doll, defense counsel did not object.

Even Mitchell said the child showed none of the usual signs of a brain injury, as did four other doctors who looked at the Ortiz case.

Yet Buchhorn, an Army wife and mother with no criminal record who went on trial while her husband was on active duty in Kuwait, spent 3 1/2 years behind bars and another 2 1/2 years on house arrest for a murder that never happened.

Valdez only dismissed the charges after failing to find an expert less radioactive than Mitchell who would still, as he had done, rule Ortiz’s death a homicide caused by child abuse.

Valdez’s office unfamiliar with case file?

Now, though, that the attorney general’s office has named Valdez as a witness in the state’s effort to avoid compensating Buchhorn for the years she served in prison for something she didn’t do, Valdez’s position is that neither she nor anybody else in her office knows enough about the case to testify.

At a February hearing in the wrongful conviction case before Chief Judge James McCabria, assistant attorney general Shon Qualseth also said there is new evidence in the case “that gives pause as to what happened.”

There really isn’t any new evidence, though there is a new expert, Dr. Amy Sheil, a forensic pathologist in the Waukesha County Medical Examiner’s Office west of Milwaukee.

Ortiz did have a skull fracture that two previous experts said was at least a week old at the time of his death, because it showed signs of healing.

But Sheil disagrees. Like Mitchell, she says that Ortiz died of blunt force trauma to the head, but unlike him and the others, she said she detected evidence of significant bleeding and swelling in the brain. She also said that the liver laceration that other doctors said was the result of CPR was caused by blunt force trauma and that Ortiz may have bled to death.

“Her opinion,” Qualseth told the court, “is that this was a death caused by homicide and this was not natural causes, so that is our evidence that we have that maybe Mrs. Buchhorn cannot bear her burden under the statute” of proving that she was wrongfully convicted.

Counsel for Valdez told the judge that it really should be the original prosecutors, who are no longer in her office, who should be answering any questions about the case. Specifically, Buchhorn’s team has been trying to learn what other than Mitchell’s testimony in the 51,008-page case file prosecutors relied on in convicting her. The answer Skepnek keeps getting is that they relied on all of it.

Buchhorn had no motive or history of harm to anyone

McCabria seemed slightly astonished by some of the state’s claims: “To say that … there are no current members of the district attorney’s office who have knowledge of the case file, I don’t know what to say about that,” he said in court. “I don’t know how anybody could make a decision to dismiss an alleged murder case and not have any knowledge of the case file.”

He also said this: “Just as a matter of an ethical obligation of a prosecutor, it’s hard for me to accept that that decision was made to not prosecute a highly publicized, a highly controversial murder case that had been sent back” — overturned — “and to make that decision without being familiar with the case file.”

There was never any plausible reason that a woman in her 40s with no history of either mental illness or lawbreaking of any kind would intentionally harm a baby in her care, and that hasn’t changed, either.

If Valdez really does not have any intention of recharging Buchhorn in a case she knows she can’t win, putting both Buchhorn and Ortiz’s family through the pain of watching her pretend otherwise is almost unimaginably cruel.

It’s also costing taxpayers plenty to fight Buchhorn’s $400,000 claim. But then, the state might gladly spend more than that to avoid having to admit it was wrong.

All of which is in keeping with Valdez’s record of high-profile losses, constant office turnover and unprofessional behavior.

Possible 1-year suspension of law license

Just recently, her office lost yet another big case. The defendant, 18-year-old Derrick Del Reed, who is white, spent the March 2023 day that a Black 14-year-old, Kamarjay Shaw, was fatally shot in the back messaging people that he wanted to end the problems between his group of friends and Shaw’s by getting a gun and using it.

He was fantasizing, he kept saying, about “a whole lot of dead n------s.” Police said they’d found gunshot residue on Reed’s hand, and a friend of the dead boy testified that Reed was the shooter. But a neighbor of the defendant said a different teenager was responsible, and the all-white jury acquitted Reed of not only murder, but even involuntary manslaughter.

Valdez is also still facing the possible one-year suspension of her law license from the state disciplinary office — or would be, if that sloooow bunch of intrafamilial hand-slappers ever got serious about punishing the misconduct of their fellow prosecutors. At the December hearing of an ethics complaint against her from Judge McCabria, another judge testified that no one wants to meet with Valdez alone, for fear of being misrepresented later.

McCabria filed the complaint after Valdez publicly accused him of lying about having consulted her on how to return to in-person court proceedings during the COVID-19 pandemic. When he showed that yes, he had communicated with her office, she texted him: “The only reason you commented is because I am a Hispanic female (in) a position of power.”

She also put out a public statement, “Unfortunately, this is yet another example of how an outspoken and honest woman is mischaracterized as untruthful by a male in power.” Then she posted, “Women of the world - be prepared! If you are hardworking, outspoken, honest, AND in a position of authority, the INSECURE MAN will try to tear you down. Not me, says I!!”

Yet yes, she is still running for reelection this year. One Democratic challenger, Tonda Hill, currently a prosecutor in Wyandotte County, has already filed to take her on in the August primary, and others are expected to do so.

“While I am proud of the many accomplishments and strides my office has made during my first term, I know that the work has just begun,” Valdez said in announcing her campaign.

Let’s hope not.