Kansas Attorney General Says Abortionist Ate Fetuses

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Mm, Mm Good

Startling allegations against an abortion doctor have been the centerpiece of two years of legislative warfare in Kansas.

Despite the revocation of his medical license, Krishna Rajanna doesn’t plan to leave the profession.

Storing soda with medical supplies wasn’t the worst of the allegations against Rajanna’s clinic.

Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has vigorously defended his attempt to wrest control of the medical records of women who had abortions at two Kansas clinics.

Last year, Kline made an even more startling attack on abortion in Kansas City. The Wichita Eagle was apparently the only newspaper that reported Kline's April 29, 2004, offensive, which then became fodder for Web sites, some of which reveled in the bizarre nature of Kline's accusations.

Kline told legislators about a filthy Kansas City, Kansas, clinic, which he said should convince lawmakers that more regulation was needed. Kline presented photographs depicting a cluttered, unsanitary medical office. And he also provided a police officer's affidavit, which made a stunning claim: that workers at the clinic believed its proprietor, a physician named Krishna Rajanna, had kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam cups in a freezer and later heated them up and stirred them into his lunch.

It was a report of a theft that initially brought detectives to the clinic .

The clinic's physician, Rajanna, claimed that $1,000 had been stolen from the clinic's office.

Howard says he was shocked by the conditions that he and Mansaw found. There were dirty dishes in the sink and on a tabletop. Trash was strewn around. Roaches crawled across countertops.

"There was an unfamiliar type stench in the room. Frankly, I was reluctant to sit down," he wrote in a notarized affidavit.

Howard masked his disgust and stuck to the business at hand -- the alleged theft. Rajanna told him that he suspected one or more employees had taken the money from a sack he kept in the unlocked back office.

Howard tells the Pitch that the doctor's financial records were in such disarray that he and Mansaw weren't able to verify that a theft had occurred. But while they were interviewing clinic employees about the missing money, one young clinic staff member, Julia Walton Garcia, made a chilling allegation: Rajanna, she told Howard, had eaten fetuses.

Howard states in his affidavit that Garcia said Rajanna kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam containers in the freezer in his office. "Julia went on to describe how she and the other girls actually witnessed Rajanna microwave one of the aborted fetuses and stir it into his lunch. Julia claimed that she shared this with some of the other employees, who confirmed that they had seen him do the very same thing," Howard wrote.

"I cautioned her," Howard tells the Pitch. "I said, 'Lying to me is one thing. I'm a cop -- people lie to me all the time. But lying to the DA's office, you could find yourself in a whole lot of trouble." Howard says he told Garcia that she could be prosecuted. But seated in Tomasic's office, Garcia told the same story.

However, what Garcia described was not actually criminal, so Tomasic could do nothing. He suggested that Garcia file complaints with state regulatory agencies and e-mailed Howard a few phone numbers to pass on to her. Howard himself called the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the agency in charge of licensing doctors and other health professionals in Kansas.

"The lady just said, 'Yeah, we get a lot of complaints about him,'" Howard says.

Garcia came in looking for someone to talk to about Rajanna's clinic, Frye says. The single mother of a toddler had worked at the clinic for about a year when she learned that she was pregnant again.

"She said, 'I work for Rajanna, and he's going to fire me because I'm pregnant. He says he can't have pregnant girls working at an abortion clinic. I feel he's doing me wrong,'" Frye tells the Pitch. Frye says Garcia complained that Rajanna sometimes shorted his employees on their paychecks. "She was pretty upset with him," Frye says.

After telling Frye about some of the problems at the clinic -- that Rajanna disposed of medical waste in regular trash bags, which he left with each night, and that he also rushed half-sedated women out the door -- she left.

The next day, Garcia came back to the Pregnancy Resource Center. This time, Frye says, Garcia offered to take photographs of Rajanna's clinic. She said she had no money, so Frye gave her $20 to buy a disposable camera. The following day, she brought the camera to Frye, who had the photos developed.

One photo showed that a bathroom used by patients and staff doubled as an instrument-sterilization room. The toilet had a brown stain smeared across the seat, and Styrofoam soda cups were stacked next to and on top of it. A pile of clutter and a broom sat next to the toilet, and a bottle of bleach sat on a dingy, peeling linoleum floor near full, open trash bags. A rubber hose ran from a sink over the toilet and into a dishwasher used for sterilizing surgical instruments, and a tray of instruments sat atop the dishwasher.

In a photo of the break room, every flat surface seemed crammed with clutter -- an open box of Cheez-Its, a bottle of soda, papers, cleaning products. A photo of the interior of the break-room refrigerator showed several cups containing pre-drawn syringes of drugs for patients along with a cake, a bottle of Dr Pepper and a bag of Kraft cheese cubes. In another photo, an orange garbage bag was held open, revealing a Styrofoam cup that appeared to contain a blob of bloody tissue.

Howard's statement was full of disturbing details. When Howard and his partner visited the clinic, Rajanna's white coat appeared rumpled and stained, and his hands looked dirty, Howard's partner, Mansaw, later told Howard that he had seen dried blood on the floor of the surgery room, which was covered in old plaid carpet, and that the room looked "nasty."

"The clinic was filthy. It was disgusting. It was repulsive," Howard tells the Pitch. "To think that there was invasive surgery going on in that clinic was not a comforting thought. It might remind you of a clinic you'd run into in a Third World country."

Then, Attorney General Kline got involved. He made a presentation before the House Federal and State Affairs Committee, saying that the conditions at Rajanna's clinic proved that a licensing law was needed. He called Rajanna's business a "back-alley" clinic. "This is a place where no woman, no person, should have to undergo a medical procedure," Kline said.

Some legislators seized on the fetus-eating allegation.

"His own staff said that he cannibalized human tissue," Mast tells the Pitch. "I had heard that they do this type of thing in China, but we in America are not ready for this. Why else would he keep them in the freezer?"

But even the tales of fetus eating and Howard's affidavit weren't enough to boost the bill's chances. With the Board of Healing Arts promising to wrap up the Rajanna matter soon, Mast's bill died in committee.

Until about five years ago, Krishna Rajanna performed abortions at Aid for Women, a Central Avenue clinic that sits in a free-standing white building with a manicured lawn and a large, neatly lettered sign that reads "Central Family Medicine."

Zaremski tells the Pitch he was not surprised that Rajanna had been disciplined. He says he stopped by Rajanna's clinic one afternoon a few years ago, just to be friendly, and noticed that the procedure room was carpeted -- making it difficult to clean and nearly impossible to sterilize. "No, it didn't surprise me. I saw it myself," Zaremski says.

Jennifer Mulich, one of Rajanna's former clinic employees, downplays the dirty conditions. "The place ain't nothing fancy," she tells the Pitch. "It's 10th and Central, for God's sakes."

Mulich, who is out of a job now that the clinic is closed, says a lot of poor women were upset when the clinic shut its doors. At $290 for an abortion -- and a sale price of $250 on Wednesdays -- Rajanna was one of the least costly abortion providers in town. "This is going to sound terrible, but we had a lot of repeat customers," she says.

Rajanna says the police came to investigate the missing $1,000 but immediately sided with the employees. Rajanna admits he kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam containers in his refrigerator's freezer, but he says he did it to keep them from rotting before they could be picked up by his biohazard disposal service. He adds that the vegetables and rice he eats from plastic containers, which he brings from home, are nothing like the Styrofoam containers in the freezer. "My food is in my own plastic containers. I make it at home and take it there," Rajanna says.

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In February 2005, a full year after Frye's initial complaint, the Board of Healing Arts took action against Rajanna. Citing numerous problems with the cleanliness of his clinic, the board fined him $1,000 and made him promise to clean the place up, get certified in advanced cardiac life support and submit to two unannounced follow-up inspections.

It wasn't the first time the board had disciplined him. In 2000, Rajanna was fined $1,000 for improperly dispensing prescription medications. A year later, he was fined another $1,000 for failing to provide Rh factor testing to patients.

On March 22 and 24 of this year, Board of Healing Arts investigator Peter Massey conducted surprise inspections of Rajanna's clinic and found that conditions had actually worsened. On the second visit, he snapped a photo of a dead mouse on the clinic floor.

"The evidence over these past few years has just been so compelling that anyone in their right mind can't avoid it," Mast tells the Pitch. "This kind of thing would never be accepted in any other medical clinic or even in a restaurant without being closed down."

The Rajanna photos, along with the January 2003 death of a 19-year-old Texas woman after an abortion at Tiller's Wichita clinic, gave the bill's proponents ammunition.

State Sen. Roger Reitz, a medical doctor who voted against previous versions of the bill, says the photos of Rajanna's clinic changed his mind on the clinic-licensing issue. Reitz remembers the moment a colleague tapped him on the shoulder during a break and slid the color photos toward him. "I was aghast. I had thought better of my colleagues," Reitz says. "It was simply unacceptable."

Massey testified that on his first surprised visit, he looked around and saw a number of problems: The floors needed vacuuming, there were soiled surgical drapes in the office that had been folded and stacked instead of thrown away, the toilet was dirty and streaked, two plastic bags full of trash sat on the office floor, old paper towels sat in the soap dishes, and there were large gaps along the baseboards in the procedure room left by the removal of carpet. In the recovery room, there was an old living-room couch with a standard bed pillow and blanket on it. The lids were off the biohazard containers, leaving bloody waste exposed. In the refrigerator, predrawn syringes of medication were unlabeled, with only a handwritten initial of the drug on the cup containing the syringes.

Two days later, Massey arrived on a Thursday morning and found the dead rodent. When Rajanna arrived and Massey told him about the mouse, Massey testified, "He somewhat exclaimed that it was working, that his rodent pest control was working." Rajanna explained that he had put out rat poison in the clinic. When Massey asked Rajanna why the clinic was so dirty, "He told me that he had explained to 'his girls' that this needed to be cleaned, but they had failed to clean," Massey testified.

At the hearing, Rajanna called two clinic employees to testify. Employee Lori Jakes admitted that she had been hired to clean the office but had quickly been called on to assist during abortions. The staff had so many duties, Jakes said, that they sometimes didn't have time to check on patients in the recovery room.

Rajanna has moved out of the building on Central Avenue and does not plan to go back. He hired an attorney in May, and he can appeal his license revocation to the district court. He says he is a good surgeon and has had a very low rate of complications. "If there's any way we can make them understand the truth, it's what I want to do," Rajanna says.

Rajanna says he was offering a service to the community by providing abortions at a lower price than other area clinics. "We were helping the women in the community. The hugs that I get is enough reward," he says.

[ItsAlive75]

I smell a sitcoooooooom!