An oral surgeon in Maryland who for months supplied his girlfriend with addictive anesthesia solutions was sentenced to 45 years in prison Wednesday after his earlier conviction of depraved-heart murder.
James Ryan, 50, who formerly ran Evolution Oral Surgery in Germantown, showed little reaction as Circuit Court Judge Cheryl A. McCally imposed the punishment, which far exceeded state sentencing suggestions for the case. The victim, Sarah Harris, was just 83 pounds when she died.
“Her body gave out at 25 years old,” McCally told him. “You knew better.”
Attorneys in the case had calculated the sentencing guidelines, which are not binding, at 10 to 25 years. But McCally said the facts that emerged at trial persuaded her to go well beyond. Among them: Ryan’s actions played a major role in Harris’s death, and he exploited a position of trust.
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Harris’s mother and sisters, sitting in the front row, clutched each others’ hands as the sentence was rendered. “I’m very, very satisfied,” her mother, Tina Harris, said after the hearing.
Moments earlier, she’d spoken with deep anguish in court, addressing many of her remarks directly to Ryan seated just 15 feet away.
“This is all I have left of my baby,” Tina Harris said, clutching a lock of Sarah’s braided hair and a satchel of her ashes. “This is all I have left because you took her. Do you see this? Do you see it?”
Ryan looked at her but didn’t respond. He moved his gaze downward. Harris’s voice grew louder.
“Don’t look away from me!” she told Ryan. “You took her, and this is all I have.”
Her daughter Sarah Harris met Ryan several years ago when she went to his practice as a patient. He then hired her, and they started dating and moved in together in a home in Clarksburg. Text messages between the two, introduced at Ryan’s trial, showed them regularly communicating about Ryan bringing home drugs from his practice and IV equipment to administer them.
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On the morning of Jan. 26, 2022, according to court records, Ryan went downstairs and found Harris unresponsive in their living room. He called 911. Paramedics pronounced Harris dead at the scene. An autopsy showed that she died of “ketamine, propofol and diazepam intoxication,” according to a report by Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Prosecutors had sought a 55-year term, the maximum allowable, arguing that Ryan kept giving Harris the drugs he stole from his office even as her condition deteriorated. Prosecutors had long said that while Ryan didn’t necessarily set out to kill Harris, he knew how deadly the drugs could be — especially when administered inside a house, sometimes by Harris herself. Prosecutors noted in court filings that Ryan had told police that a month before Harris’s death, he had to perform CPR at their home to revive her from an overdose of ketamine.
Ryan’s attorneys sought a far shorter term that would give their client a chance at parole by age 60, arguing that he acted to “alleviate the pain of the woman he loved, but made the wrong decisions.” Ryan’s lawyers stressed that one of three drugs found in Harris’s body — diazepam — comes in a pill form and was taken by Harris herself. They said during Ryan’s trial that prosecutors discounted the possibility that Harris took her own life. Defense attorneys had stressed that Ryan was trying to treat Harris’s anxiety while keeping her off street drugs and that his own judgment was clouded by drug abuse and mental health struggles.
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“Dr. Ryan was, and is, a deeply flawed individual, but he had no desire to kill Ms. Harris,” attorneys Paul Kemp and Aindrea Conroy wrote. “To the contrary, he loved Ms. Harris deeply and wanted their relationship to grow and for her to be healthy.”
But the judge, McCally, spoke at length on Wednesday about Ryan’s own dangerous actions, as revealed in the text messages and in a video he apparently recorded of Harris when she appeared to be high.
The text messages showed that it was February 2021 when Ryan first introduced her to ketamine, a drug often used for surgery sedation, which he said would help her anxiety.
“I can give you an injection,” he wrote. “The anxiety will be completely gone in 6 seconds.”
The texts indicated that Ryan may have, on some level, thought he was helping her.
“I do understand, sir, that you didn’t set out to kill Sarah Harris,” she said.
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But the judge said he had crossed a line.
“That’s when the march to Sarah’s death started,” she said.
The couple’s conversations expanded to other drugs and supplies including IV poles, saline bags, gauze, tape and 20-gauge needles.
“Can you get more Versed and ketamine,” Harris wrote on Aug. 27, 2021. “And also IV catheter.”
The texts were often written while Harris was at their home and Ryan was at his office. At one point, as noted by McCally on Wednesday, Ryan wrote to Harris that he had given her some more ketamine while she slept.
The judge also referenced a 10-second video, apparently taken by Ryan, of the two of them sitting next to each other. Harris had an arm up in the air as it if was floating. That he would make such a video and keep it made an impression on the judge.
“The fact that that seemed appropriate in your world is gut-wrenching,” she said.
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McCally said there were details about the crime scene that didn’t make any sense, and she suggested to Ryan that he had cleaned things up before the police got there. Among things that were out of place: vials of drugs in Harris’s purse that were not near her body. There also was no evident IV pole for police to see, even though the two had discussed getting a pole in text messages and one had been seen there earlier. An IV was eventually found in a closet.
“Did it wheel itself over there?” McCally asked aloud in court, and then noted to Ryan that he had been acting in “self-preservation” mode.
Ryan spoke for about seven minutes. He said there were no words that could convey his amount of remorse and regret.
Harris received good grades in school while struggling with mental health issues in her midteens. She graduated from Montgomery County’s Quince Orchard High School and earned a scholarship to Montgomery College, according to her family. She also participated in beauty contests for Miss Maryland and Miss Maryland Petite, which she won in 2020, according to her family.
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“She was the light of my life,” her mother Tina Harris said in court Wednesday. “She was a beautiful, beautiful light.”
Tina Harris again spoke directly to Ryan, saying that in the year he was with her daughter “you destroyed her.”
And she spoke to the judge of unrelenting despair.
“I don’t want to live in this dark world,” she said. “I don’t want to be without her. And the very thought of having to get up every morning is too much to bear. And time doesn’t help. If anything it’s worse, because I know she’s not coming back … I will never feel her touch again. I will never hear her call me Momma again.”
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