A Woman Who Turned a Hospital into a Crime Scene

Summary

On February 19, 1994, the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital looked just like any other California hospital on a Saturday night. Until Gloria Ramirez arrived. She was 31. A mother of two. Diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer. But what happened in that ER had nothing to do with her cancer—at least, not in the usual way. She walked in breathing fast, confused, and speaking in slurred sentences. Her heart was racing. Her chest was rising and falling in a weird rhythm doctors instantly recognized: Cheyne–Stokes respiration. That’s a dangerous sign—something was seriously wrong with her brain or lungs. Her boyfriend, Johnnie Estrada, had called 911 earlier that night. Gloria had spent the whole day vomiting. By the time paramedics brought her in around 8:15 p.m., her body was crashing. The ER team jumped into action. They gave her three powerful sedatives—diazepam, midazolam, and lorazepam. Then lidocaine and Bretylium to calm her heart. Nothing was working. Her condition got worse. They prepped the defibrillator to shock her heart back into rhythm. That’s when things got strange. First, the smell. As nurses leaned in to treat her, they noticed a garlic-like odor coming from her mouth. Not just a hint—strong enough to turn heads. Then, the sheen. Her body looked like it had been coated in oil. None of the staff had applied anything. And it wasn’t sweat. Nurse Susan Kane went to draw blood. She noticed an ammonia-like smell coming from the blood tube itself. That wasn’t normal. She handed the sample to a medical resident, Dr. Julie Gorchynski, who looked down and saw something floating in it—yellow-brown particles, like crystals or sand. Seconds later, Susan Kane felt heat rising in her face. Then everything went black. She fainted. The ER spun into chaos. Julie Gorchynski, who had just handled the same blood sample, began to feel dizzy. She walked out to the nurses’ station to catch her breath. Before she could even answer a co-worker’s question, she colla...