A Lawrence woman who was convicted and later exonerated in the death of a 9-month-old Eudora boy has filed a new federal lawsuit that includes allegations that prosecutors and the coroner hid crucial information while fabricating other evidence.
Attorneys filed the case this week on behalf of Carrody Buchhorn, 50, and her husband and two sons. It names the Douglas County Commission, City of Eudora, coroner Dr. Erik Mitchell, Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez and former deputy DA Joshua Seiden as defendants.
A jury in 2018 found Buchhorn guilty of reckless second-degree murder of a 9-month-old boy who had been in her care at a Eudora day care. The Kansas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in April 2021 largely because Buchhorn’s trial attorneys had failed to challenge coroner Mitchell’s theory of how the boy died, which top pediatric neurologists called “absolutely false,” “made up” and “fantastical.”
Valdez’s office continued to prosecute the case, however, until a judge dismissed it in December 2022 because prosecutors had failed to seek a new expert opinion in time.
The DA’s office pledged to appeal the dismissal but announced in January 2023 that their new expert pathologist, Dr. Jane Turner, had found that the boy had died from a heart defect and other natural conditions. The DA’s office’s press release at the time stated that they did not have sufficient evidence to continue prosecution. (Read more background on the case at the links below this article.)
In February 2023, Buchhorn filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit in Douglas County District Court. Altogether, Buchhorn spent more than 5 1/2 years in custody of the Douglas County jail, Topeka prison and on house arrest before her case was dismissed. That case is ongoing.
The new federal case was filed Monday, which was the two-year anniversary of the judge’s dismissal of the criminal case against Buchhorn.
Among relief sought in the petition’s 73 pages, Buchhorn’s attorneys — William Skepnek and Brennan Fagan, of Lawrence, and Quentin Templeton, of Overland Park — ask that the defendants put in place protocols to stop the wrongful convictions of innocent people.
Allegations against the coroner
The lawsuit alleges that Mitchell falsely claimed to have examined the infant’s heart and found it to be normal — a heart that had been harvested for organ donation a day prior to Mitchell’s autopsy.
The lawsuit details the coroner’s track record, starting with how he came to Kansas in 1994 following an investigation into his prior office in Onondaga County, New York. Among allegations documented in the New York Times, Mitchell was allowed to resign rather than face criminal charges following an investigation.
“The District Attorney began investigating Dr. Mitchell when it was revealed that a man convicted of child pornography had photographs taken of himself with a corpse in the Medical Examiner’s office,” the New York Times reported in 1993. “The District Attorney also found that morgue employees took photographs of one another in playful poses over the body of a female suicide victim and that they provided the pathology department at University Hospital in Syracuse with bladders and kidneys from about 150 bodies, often without family consent.”
The publication also reported that Onondaga County had faced a $10,000 fine because Mitchell and his staff had “illegally stored mercury in the county lab and flushed diced brains and other organs down the morgue drain.”
Then he came to Kansas. He’d come to Topeka in March 1994, the Topeka Capital Journal has reported. Douglas County hired and rehired him as coroner for more than 20 years, starting in June 1996.
Mitchell could not be reached for comment this week. Eight phone numbers possibly connected to Mitchell were disconnected or out of service, as was a phone number tied to his former firm, Frontier Forensics Midwest. He did not respond to an email sent to an address possibly linked to him. This article will be updated if we are able to reach him.
In Buchhorn’s case, the lawsuit alleges that Mitchell invented a theory of death that would fit prosecutors’ and law enforcement’s narrative that Buchhorn must have been the person who murdered 9-month-old Oliver “Ollie” Ortiz, of Eudora.
Oliver did not have any brain injuries, but Mitchell said he died from “depolarization of neurons” caused by a blow to the head. (After Buchhorn was convicted, that theory was dismantled by multiple neurological experts, and even Mitchell himself admitted that he couldn’t provide the court with evidence of anyone dying from blunt force trauma without evidence of injury to the brain.)
But Oliver’s heart had been removed and donated, and his heart valves were harvested. A pathologist who specialized in cardiac tissue examined the heart and created a report.
“That report and slides revealed that Ortiz suffered from a congenital heart defect — a patent foramen ovale, or a hole in his heart that allowed blood to flow through the heart without being filtered of debris in the lungs,” according to the lawsuit. The case cites the report from Turner, the expert pathologist that prosecutors had asked to review the case. “The cardiac autopsy also found a ‘focal area of acute ischemia’ — a portion of the heart that had been damaged by deprivation of oxygen between 12- and 24-hours prior to the child’s death.”
Despite having that report within seven days of Ollie’s death, the lawsuit alleges the defendants worked together to falsely accuse Buchhorn “for a murder that never occurred.”
Mitchell’s autopsy report details his removal of the heart and examination of parts of Oliver’s heart, and how they were normal. “But the normal heart described in Mitchell’s autopsy report had to be fabricated as on September 30 he could not have examined a heart that had been removed the day before, September 29, for tissue donation,” the case alleges.
“But the absence of a heart did not deter Mitchell from documenting examination of a non-existent heart in his September 30 autopsy, finding it normal and describing it as having formed a fossa ovalis — meaning the hole between the chambers of the fetal heart had closed and there was no patent foramen ovale.”
After her review, Turner wrote that “The autopsy finding of a patent foramen ovale is significant in that this congenital heart defect put Oliver at risk for a lethal arterial stroke. Such a stroke is ischemic and, therefore, undetectable at autopsy when the death is sudden.”
‘Defendants did not cease their public accusations’
The charges against Buchhorn were initially filed April 14, 2017, more than six months after Oliver’s death. Former DA Charles Branson was still in office at the time. But Valdez and Seiden took office in January 2021, and they continued prosecution after Buchhorn’s second-degree murder conviction was overturned in August 2021.
The new federal case alleges that for eight years now, the defendants “have continued working together concealing their falsehoods while continuing to publicly to accuse Mrs. Buchhorn of murdering a 9-month-old-child they well know died of natural causes.”
Valdez and Seiden did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article.
The lawsuit states that Valdez “was the supervisor of the DA’s Office, who in turn was supervised by the County Commission of Douglas County.” District attorney is an elected office of its own, but the DA — like the sheriff and other county department administrators — brings annual budget requests to the Douglas County Commission.
Karrey Britt, a spokesperson for Douglas County, said in response to a question seeking to clarify that “The County Commission does not supervise the District Attorney’s Office.” She did not comment further on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that after Turner’s report was completed, “Valdez and Seiden then began an effort to publicly ‘spin’ the report to exonerate their own conduct while shifting blame to others, hiding (Defendants’) as an exoneration of themselves while blaming others, hiding the repeated constitutional violations, and continuing to claim Mrs. Buchhorn was a murderer.”
Part of that was within the statement Valdez’s office issued in January 2023 announcing that they would cease prosecution of the case.
“Upon receipt and review of the forensic pathologist’s report dated January 3, 2023 and having conferred with other attorneys in this office, I have concluded that at this time, we do not have sufficient evidence to proceed with the prosecution of Ms. Buchhorn,” the statement read.
It continued: “While there are conflicting findings between the State’s two retained experts, as well as other evidence to support prosecution, we do not believe the evidence is likely to meet our burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Again, my campaign mantra was ‘Setting a Higher Standard.'”
Yet during a public presentation a month later, Valdez said that “there is other evidence that we cannot comment on — believe me — there was other evidence,” and that Buchhorn is “not exonerated. That’s another thing I want to make clear,” according to the lawsuit.
“The interplay between Valdez and Seiden was designed — and succeeded — in causing the public to believe that Valdez and Seiden possessed secret evidence that Mrs. Buchhorn was guilty of murdering a nine-month-old baby in her care,” the lawsuit states. “But there is no such secret evidence, and both Valdez and Seiden knew they had nothing to reveal.”
The lawsuit states that Valdez and Seiden failed to prosecute Mitchell for his alleged perjury.
Valdez lost her reelection bid, and her term in office will end in January. Seiden’s employment in the office came to an end in June.
‘Why are there multiple evidence logs?’
In December 2022, after the criminal charges against Buchhorn were dismissed, she sought the return of her property that had been taken in the investigation — her pants, shoes and shirt, and her Macbook laptop. None of the property was used as evidence during her trial, according to the lawsuit.
The case alleges that when Buchhorn asked for those items back, her attorney had to file a motion to get the items back. They ultimately discovered that there was an evidence log that didn’t include a reference to the seized laptop, and a separate one that did.
The lawsuit alleges that the DA’s office eventually told Buchhorn she could reclaim her property from Eudora police, but when she went to get it, she was told that her laptop could not be found.
“Eudora PD had represented to Mrs. Buchhorn that the DA’s Office — not Eudora PD — had last been in possession of the laptop and had failed to complete a chain of custody form acknowledging taking the laptop,” the case alleges.
“To date, Defendants have refused and failed to return Mrs. Buchhorn’s Macbook laptop computer,” the lawsuit continues.
Eudora Police Chief Wes Lovett said he would not be able to respond to a request for comment by the initial deadline he was given and did not respond to an email offering to extend that deadline.
Request for relief
The lawsuit claims that the case against Buchhorn deprived her and her family members of time they should’ve had together and interfered with their relationships.
The petition includes eight total counts, such as “fabricating and perpetuating a knowingly false and nonexistent cause of death,” “malicious prosecution and unlawful pretrial detention” and “seizure, destruction, and taking of property without just compensation,” all in violation of federal civil rights laws.
Buchhorn’s attorneys ask for compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial; for recovery of costs of the expenses of litigation; and for a trial by jury.
It also asks the court to “Award Plaintiffs injunctive relief requiring Defendants to put in place (and fund) supervision and compliance protocols that actually prevent, uncover, and stop the wrongful convictions of innocent citizens.”
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
Related coverage:
Woman exonerated in Eudora infant’s death alleges coroner, prosecutors hid and fabricated evidence
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