Kim Andreassen weighed eighty-seven pounds. She was twenty-three, had a disease that had stunted her growth, and went for kidney dialysis three times a week, and her physician had warned that general anesthesia would be dangerous for her. According to her mother, Ulla Isaksen, the Costa Mesa dentist Tony Protopappas assured them there were ways around that which would be safe. In September 1982 she died in his clinic during dental surgery. In February 1983 two more of his patients were put under for oral surgery and never recovered: Cathryn Jones, thirty-one, who died without regaining consciousness two days later, and Patricia Craven, thirteen, who died of cardiac and respiratory arrest eleven days after her operation.
The prosecution said all three had died of gross overdoses of anesthesia given by Protopappas or, at his direction, by an unlicensed associate. He was not licensed to administer the general anesthetic he used, and he was taking narcotics himself at the time. That February state officials obtained a court order closing his practice, and the State Board of Dental Examiners charged him with gross negligence and incompetence in the three deaths. Families sued for wrongful death and other former patients filed malpractice claims. His wife of three months filed for divorce in March 1983, saying she feared for her life. On April 9, 1983, the Orange County district attorney charged him with murder in all three deaths, and police said they feared he might flee.
The case was not that he meant to kill anyone. The prosecution argued that he had given anesthesia with such conscious disregard for his patients' lives that their deaths were second-degree murder. The trial opened in Santa Ana on March 28, 1984, with Kim Andreassen's mother as the first witness. Protopappas, thirty-eight, testified that he had acted swiftly and responsibly when he realized the patients were in trouble, describing the stimulants and narcotic-reversing drugs he gave Andreassen before calling paramedics. He was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder, and on October 22, 1984, he was sentenced to fifteen years to life. The case is cited in medical and legal writing on criminal liability for deaths under anesthesia.
He served more than twenty-five years, and the argument over his release outlasted the trial. In prison he worked in the dental lab, where his lawyer said dentists praised his skill. A parole board found him suitable for release in July 2010, on the reasoning, as his lawyer, Rich Pfeiffer, put it, that his crime grew out of being a licensed dentist, which he would never be again. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision on December 15, 2010, using a power California voters had given governors in 1988. On June 22, 2011, the Fourth District Court of Appeal overturned the governor and ordered him paroled, and he walked out of Folsom Prison that August, at sixty-five. Pfeiffer then asked the court to hold the state's prosecutors in contempt for keeping him in prison several days past the date the release took effect. Protopappas said he planned to work in a dental lab.