photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dr. Terra Frazier, right, leaves the courtroom Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, after testifying that she believes 9-month-old Oliver Ortiz died from child abuse. Carrody Buchhorn, who was accused in Oliver's death, is at center with her attorney Quentin Templeton.

A wrongful conviction trial that was expected to conclude Thursday will spill into next week after the plaintiff’s attorney spent the entire day attempting to discredit a doctor who concluded that a baby had died from abuse, not natural causes.

During an often tense six hours, Dr. Terra Frazier, a child abuse pediatrician from Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, stood firmly by her findings that 9-month-old Oliver “Ollie” Ortiz had suffered a number of traumatic injuries on Sept. 29, 2016, at his Eudora day care — the “totality” of which ultimately led to his death.

photo by: Contributed

Oliver Ortiz

Carrody Buchhorn, who worked at the day care, was convicted of Oliver’s death in 2018, but her conviction was overturned due to ineffective assistance of counsel. Then-District Attorney Suzanne Valdez wanted to retry Buchhorn, but ceased prosecution in 2023 after hiring a forensic pathologist who concluded that Oliver had died of natural causes.

Buchhorn then sued for wrongful conviction, resulting in a bench trial that is now heading into its seventh nonconsecutive day and that will require Buchhorn to prove her innocence to Chief Judge James McCabria by a preponderance — or 51% — of the evidence.

As the Journal-World reported, Frazier testified for hours on Wednesday about more than a dozen injuries she said Oliver had sustained, including nine to his head.

On Thursday, while being cross-examined by Buchhorn’s attorney Bill Skepnek, she said that Oliver’s injuries would have required more than four instances of blunt force trauma because more than four “planes” of his head were bruised. She demonstrated to the court where the injuries were by pointing to the sides, top and back of her head, while translating medical language into layman’s terms.

Frazier was adamant that Oliver did not have an “overwhelming infection” that could have played a role in his death. The pathologist who found he had died from natural causes, Jane Turner, had said that infections combined with a patent foramen ovale (PFO), or a hole in his heart, resulted in blood clots forming and traveling from the right side of Oliver’s heart to the left and blocking blood flow from the coronary artery, likely causing a heart attack and possibly a stroke.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dr. Terra Frazier testifies at the wrongful conviction trial of carrody Buchhorn on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

Frazier, who had based her findings on essentially the same reports and data available to Turner, said one reason she disagreed with Turner is that Oliver “didn’t have any reason to have thrombi,” which are materials in the body that can develop into blood clots, which could then lead to the kind of heart attack or stroke posited by Turner.

“You need abnormalities for thrombi to develop,” she said, and also a change of pressure to produce the result described by Turner, and Oliver didn’t appear to have either.

Frazier said that the trauma Oliver experienced happened on the day he died, but she could not pinpoint exactly when it occurred. She believed it happened in a period shortly before Oliver was found unresponsive at 3:10 p.m. In the earlier part of the day he had been described as happy and apparently healthy by people who saw him, she said.

Frazier did not specify the nature of the blunt force trauma — that is, whether it was punching or kicking or something else, she didn’t know — but she indicated that it could have happened relatively quickly, in minutes when an adult was alone with Oliver.

“I can’t say when he sustained his injuries,” she said. “…I know that he had injuries at the time of his autopsy.”

Contrary to what Turner had said, Oliver also had some common indicators of abuse, Frazier said, including cerebral edema, hemorrhage of the dura (a membrane in the skull), and the beginning of herniation, which refers to a swelling of the brain.

All of the medical professionals involved in the case agreed that Oliver had a skull fracture, but disagreement existed as to when it had occurred. Turner, for example, said it had to have happened days before Oliver died because of signs that it had started to heal, but Dr. Erik Mitchell, the coroner, said it was fresh. For her part, Frazier said she would not attempt to age the skull fracture but indicated that skull bones healed differently from other bones and that autopsy photos had depicted a “big, wet area near that fracture.”

Frazier landed on a cause of death that was akin to what the coroner in Buchhorn’s criminal trial had claimed — blunt force trauma — but she said her conclusions were arrived at independently and were “similar” to but not identical to those of Mitchell, whose “depolarization” theory has been attacked in some quarters as “junk science.”

Frazier preferred the term “dysfunction,” saying that multiple traumatic injuries to Oliver led to symptoms that caused his brain to function in an abnormal way, ultimately leading to his death. It was the “totality,” she repeated many times, of what was happening in his body in the wake of injury that made it fail. She also used the medical term “sequelae,” which she described as the “cascade of effects,” including disrupted brain functions, that can come from traumatic injury.

“Dysfunction causes the brain to not work well, which causes other parts of the body to not work well,” she said.

While Frazier characterized her role as “representing the child” and “educating” the court, Skepnek suggested she was simply advocating for the state’s position and sought to discredit her by noting that a judge in Junction City had found that Frazier had not acted like an “independent” expert in a case there but more like an investigator for the state.

Skepnek and Frazier went back and forth on whether the medical literature and case studies cited by Frazier backed up her conclusions.

“I don’t believe this witness has the facts to support her opinion,” Skepnek told McCabria at one point.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Attorneys Bill Skepnek, for the plaintiff, and Mackenzie Baxter, for the state, speak with witness Dr. Terra Frazier on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

Mackenzie Baxter, representing the state, asked Frazier, “There’s not one specific case study that refers (specifically) to Oliver Ortiz?”

“Correct,” Frazier said.

Frazier’s report on Oliver’s death was completed in December of 2022, nearly a year before Turner’s report. Frazier said the DA’s Office told her about Turner’s report and that the prosecution was ceasing, from which she understood that she was no longer needed in the case. She said no one ever contacted her, when the wrongful conviction lawsuit arose, about writing a new report that would specifically rebut Turner’s findings.

Though Frazier’s testimony was heard this week, the court still has to make a ruling on whether she will be considered an expert witness in the case.

By the end of the day, Skepnek told the court: “We all know that whichever way this goes, this is going to be appealed.”

The trial is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, when the state is expected to wrap up its case.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Chief Judge James McCabria is pictured at the wrongful conviction trial of Carrody Buchhorn on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.