 People from all over the world come to St. Luke's for treatment. I would not want my worst enemy to go there. St. Luke's has had outcomes that are approximately 70% higher failure rates in the first year than what we'd expect to happen. They always said we was in the right place. You know, they had the best doctors around. Never through this whole process did anyone ever tell us he probably wasn't going to make it. When the best and brightest minds in medicine come together as one... Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center boasted for years of being one of the country's best heart centers. Why would you trust your heart to anyone else? It's located in the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world. It was here that famed surgeon Denton Cooley performed some of the world's first heart transplants. Judy Cuiton's husband, David, went to St. Luke's for a heart transplant because of its reputation. We honestly thought we were the best place there was. When he got the call, we were just so ready to do this. He had a good attitude. Like, this was nothing. It was scary, but it made it feel better. Because, you know, he was ready. He was ready to do it. Dr. Jeffrey Morgan performed David's surgery. He even hired a year earlier to lead the program. After the transplant, Morgan spoke with the family. He recalled the conversation in a written statement. I thoroughly explained to Mrs. Cuiton that her husband was critically ill and was on a lot of medication to keep his blood pressure up. The family remembers it differently. He assured us that everything was great. There were no complications. We were so relieved because we thought, this has been a success. David's medical records would later reveal the new heart wasn't pumping enough blood on its own. He would have several more operations in the following week. On day five, David had a stroke. But the family said nobody told them. On day six, Judy recalled Morgan telling her the latest surgery had gone well. But... They were going to have to take this heart out and put an artificial heart in until they could get him a different heart. The next morning, a nurse told them that David had suffered another stroke and his organs were shutting down. The family removed life support later that day. David was 64. John Snyder is with the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. They track transplant outcomes for the government. Our models tell us how many transplant failures or deaths we would expect within that first year. And St. Luke's failures have been about 70% higher. Transplant hospitals are measured in part based on how many patients survived the first year. Between 2014 and 2016, St. Luke's heart transplant survival rate was ranked among the worst in the country. St. Luke's transplant program leaders declined to be interviewed on camera. They acknowledged the poor transplant outcomes but said the spike in patient deaths was confined to 2015. They provided their own data showing improved survival rates following Morgan's arrival. About two months after her husband's death, Judy received an anonymous letter. To the family of David Atoquitan, I struggled with whether or not I should be writing this letter. The transplant that performed the transplant has had mishap after mishap and should not have been allowed to operate on patients. It really shook me to my core. Judy spent the next year searching for answers. It took me weeks and weeks and weeks to get the medical records from them. And as I looked through them and not knowing what every medical term was, I was googling it, trying to make sense of it. Within the 2,000 pages, there were clues. Medical experts reviewed the records and told us the autopsy found signs of a heart attack in the donor heart, a rare occurrence so soon after transplant. On another page, a St. Luke's physician noted that too much time may have passed before the heart was transplanted into David. Nobody mentioned that concern to Judy. She also wasn't aware of the other ways the heart program had struggled under Morgan. In one of Morgan's first transplant surgeries at St. Luke's, he sewed shut a major vein, blocking blood from flowing into the patient's heart, according to 6 medical professionals familiar with the case. The patient died a few weeks later. In a different transplant the next year, Morgan stitched through another major vein, leaving the man in critical condition, according to his cardiologist. Privacy rules prevented Morgan from commenting on the first case. He said the second was complicated by previous cancer treatments. Federal regulators cited the program in January for its poor transplant outcomes. The hospital outlined changes it had made in order to avoid the loss of federal funds. My name is Jeffrey Morgan, and I'm the surgical director. But St. Luke's continued to make misleading claims in its promotional materials. The go-to premier program locally, in my opinion, and nationally, our results are excellent. They're better than the national expected results or volumes. The day after ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle questioned hospital officials about their promotional materials, the videos and brochures disappeared from their website. Several top doctors and surgeons have left St. Luke's in recent years. One was David's previous cardiologist. He tried to get David to leave as well. David's decision was going to be to stay at St. Luke's. I look back now and think that was the biggest mistake we ever made.