Category: Charlotte, North Carolina Local News

As Tylor Savage lay in a hospital bed at Lake Norman Regional Medical Center, her blood pressure kept crashing.

The pain in her abdomen seared despite the Dilaudid. A tube down her throat kept the Huntersville woman breathing.

Gastric bypass surgery two days before, a procedure intended to improve her life, left a bowel leak, which created an infection. Her parents and her fiance, Zach Miller, hoped a second surgery to repair the leak would help. But she’d developed sepsis, a life-threatening response to infection.

“I want to go home,” she’d told Zach while she could still talk.

Instead, just after 6 p.m. on a Sunday in July 2021, Savage, 26, was dead.

Savage’s family says her surgeon is to blame. They are among former patients or their family members who have filed at least six malpractice lawsuits against Dr. Timothy Ryan Heider, a surgeon who has practiced in the Charlotte area for at least 15 years.

Despite having elective surgeries that normally carry a death rate of less than 0.1%, two Heider patients died over the past five years within days of him performing bariatric surgery. Less than a month after Savage lost her life, a Charlotte woman died of sepsis caused by a surgical leak.

Other patients died after different surgeries by Heider. Still others say they have endured serious complications, including kidney dialysis in one case and, in another, stomach removal.

The North Carolina Medical Board has been notified of at least four cash settlements of wrongful death and malpractice lawsuits filed against Heider.

But while Heider has received two nondisciplinary “letters of concern” from the medical board, the board has not taken any action against his license to practice medicine.

Most physicians with multiple malpractice settlements like Heider keep practicing, facing few consequences from regulators, data shows.

As a 2025 complaint inches its way through the medical board’s mostly confidential investigative process, and another lawsuit accuses the surgeon of malpractice, Heider’s former patients tell the Charlotte Observer that they have little hope those efforts will lead to the surgeon losing his license.

“People are dying, and no one is doing anything,” said Debora Savage, Tylor’s mother.

‘A doctor to the stars’

The Observer made many attempts to reach Heider to ask about accusations against him, including sending two letters, visiting his home, multiple phone calls and text messages. The Observer also contacted Atrium Health, his employer since May 2025, and his Raleigh-based attorney, Susan Fountain. Heider has not responded.

Much of what the Observer has learned about him came from legal records, letters from the state medical board and interviews with former patients or their families.

After graduating from the UNC School of Medicine in 1999, Heider began his surgical residency at UNC Hospitals, where he remained through at least 2006. A few years later, he was working at Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in Mooresville, performing general surgeries in the emergency department.

By the 2010s, the surgeon was performing bariatric operations at the hospital and working at the affiliated Center for Surgical Weight Loss, in time becoming its bariatric medical director, according to a social media post by the hospital.

For decades before the rise of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, bariatric surgery was one of the few effective weight loss treatments for patients living with obesity. In gastric sleeve procedures, surgeons remove a large part of the stomach to limit how much a patient can eat. For bypass procedures, they create a pouch to circumvent most of the stomach and some of the small intestine, reducing the body’s ability to absorb fat and other calorie sources.

Progress with less-invasive laparoscopic techniques made these surgeries safer and more appealing to patients suffering health consequences of excess weight like high blood pressure, sleep apnea, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. In the six years from 1998 to 2004, the number of bariatric surgeries in the U.S. increased ninefold, from 13,386 to 121,055.

At the Lake Norman practice, the surgeries offered hope to patients who’d exhausted nonsurgical weight loss options.

By the mid-2010s, glowing reviews on patient forums like ObesityHelp.com boasted about how one Charlotte-area surgeon helped patients regain their lives. Patients traveled from states away to see Heider, according to the doctor’s professional Instagram page.

“Hands Down, Dr. Heider is one of the BEST surgeons available,” an online reviewer, Sammy D., wrote in November 2014. “What a great doctor and friend. I have no regrets whatsoever and will recommend Dr. Heider, and LNRMC to anyone!”

Tisha Kavanagh assumed the largely affluent Lake Norman area, with its waterfront estates and gated communities, would draw only the best doctors.

“He was basically the surgeon for the stars here in North Carolina,” said Kavanagh, who Heider performed two surgeries on. Though her initial weight loss surgery in 2022 went well, her second procedure — to remove excess skin — the following year left her with a monthslong infection, she said.

Unknown to Kavanagh, by the time of her second surgery, one widow had already received a wrongful death payment following Heider’s surgery on her husband. And Heider had agreed to two more wrongful death settlements and a malpractice settlement.

They wouldn’t be the last lawsuits.

‘I don’t want to die’

Zach Miller still hears the code-blue alarm from his late fiance’s hospital room.

Miller and Tylor Savage had connected online in 2019 and first met at a Rochester brewery in Miller’s home state of New York. Savage, who had grown up in North Carolina, was living with her sister. They were engaged a year and a half later.

With bright red hair and a warm smile, Savage was beautiful, Miller said. But it was her selflessness — steady throughout her life, according to her family — that most stuck out.

At her day job as a funding coordinator for a medical equipment company, Savage advocated for patients with disabilities to receive custom mobility aids. In her free time, she created care packages for the homeless at a local shelter.

In March 2021, the Savage family and Miller moved to Huntersville, not far from where the Savages once lived in Troutman. There the couple would camp and hike, traversing the region’s forested trails with their black lab, Sully.

Yet Savage worried her weight – just under 300 pounds – would hold the pair back. She wanted to ride horses together. She wanted to zipline. She wanted to feel beautiful on her wedding day.

When the diets and medications failed, Savage turned to weight-loss surgery, planning the timing carefully. By her wedding the following Labor Day weekend, her weight would be stable.

But as Savage’s first day in the hospital wore on, her pain intensified. By evening, her blood pressure and heart rate had become erratic. Though an initial CT scan didn’t show the bowel leak that doctors suspected, a follow-up scan around 2 a.m. on the morning of the 11th did. That would allow fluid and bacteria to seep into her abdomen, causing a serious infection.

“I don’t want to die,” Savage said over and over, her parents remember.

Heider had left town after Savage’s initial surgery, court records alleged, so a second surgeon, Dr. David Gish, handled Savage’s follow-up care.

By the time Savage went into her second surgery, “it was too late,” court records say. Savage died from sepsis a few hours later.

“I can’t do this,” Miller texted his sister, Haley, that night. “She’s gone.”

Both named as defendants, Gish and Heider denied liability in response to the Savage family’s wrongful death lawsuit.

The medical board review of Heider’s surgery found that the doctor didn’t properly record Savage’s vital signs after her operation, but he did not otherwise violate the standards of care in her case, according to a public letter posted on the board’s website.

Soon another death at Lake Norman hospital

Less than a month after Savage died, Heider operated on Lynnette York of Charlotte, to convert a gastric sleeve to a full bypass. The surgery was a common revision for issues like gastroesophageal reflux disease or weight gain that persisted after bariatric surgery.

By 11 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2021, the morning after her surgery, York was “deathly ill,” court records say, and was transferred to the ICU that afternoon.

At Lake Norman hospital, a CT scan showed York had two intestinal leaks. Following surgery for the leaks, York was “in septic shock, acute respiratory failure, kidney failure, bilateral pneumonia and metabolic acidosis,” a wrongful death lawsuit filed by her husband, Richard, alleged.

York, 54, died in the early morning hours of Aug. 7, 2021.

Heider did not perform a leak test during the surgery. But if he had, he could have caught the leak while York was still in the operating room, a review by the state medical board found.

On top of that, Heider performed a surgery other than what York consented to — one that carried different risks, the lawsuit alleged. York had agreed to a laparoscopic bypass, not the mini bypass she received, the medical board review noted.

That review, and a review of Tylor Savage’s care, led to a nondisciplinary “public letter of concern” from the state medical board in January 2024, nearly three years after both patients’ deaths. But no formal disciplinary action was taken against Heider’s license to practice.

Heider and co-defendent Lake Norman Medical Group denied wrongdoing in York’s death in court filings. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount in December 2022.

Usually safe procedures

Serious complications from bariatric surgery are rare, and death is even rarer, research has found.

About 0.1% of patients die after weight loss surgery, and around 4% experience major complications, according to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.

“The reality is these surgeries we’re doing today are safer than gallbladder surgery,” Dr. Richard Peterson, president of the society, told the Observer.

Some complications, like vitamin and mineral deficiencies, can be common among surgery patients, according to Dr. Farah Husain, a surgeon and professor in the Division of Bariatric Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University’s School of Medicine.

But death after bariatric surgery should be the exception, both Husain and Peterson emphasized.

“It doesn’t matter the complication, quite honestly — it’s very uncommon to die after bariatric surgery,” Husain said.

Multiple malpractice settlements are rare

Heider has been sued at least six times, with four cases settled out of court, one dropped and one still pending.

Research has repeatedly shown that it’s rare for physicians to have multiple paid malpractice claims.

Only about 1% of doctors nationwide had more than two payments made to patients for medical malpractice, and 0.2% had three or more, according to a 2016 study by the New England Journal of Medicine that examined nine years of payout data.

A 2019 study in the same journal found just 2.3% of doctors had two or more payouts. Only about 2% of doctors in one 2020 Illinois study had two or more payments made to patients for medical negligence.

That’s true across specialties, according to Dr. Gerald Hickson, a Vanderbilt physician and researcher who studies malpractice, including how to identify high-risk clinicians.

“Most physicians don’t have any payments at all,” said Bob Oshel, a PhD and former associate director for research and disputes for the National Practitioner Data Bank.

In 2024, insurance companies reported only 58 payouts from malpractice lawsuits to the North Carolina Medical Board, which licenses more than 50,000 doctors. That’s about one payment for every 1,000 doctors.

Doctors keep practicing after lawsuit payouts

Doctors with an unusually high number of malpractice payouts — including for cases where patients died — often continue to practice, research shows.

More than 92% of physicians nationwide with five or more malpractice claims had continued practicing, the 2019 New England Journal of Medicine study found. Many moved on to smaller or solo practices, where they may face less oversight.

In addition, few doctors with repeat medical malpractice payouts get disciplined by state medical boards, which are frequently run by doctors, one study found.

“You have the guys with the worst of the worst records for malpractice dollars paid, and not a whole lot of action taken by licensing boards or hospitals,” said Oshel, who co-authored the study.

Since 2011, the medical board has been notified of at least three wrongful death settlements and one malpractice settlement from lawsuits naming Heider as a defendant.

Lawsuit settlements don’t “establish” a violation of the state’s Medical Practice Act, says a medical board written statement sent to the Observer in response to several questions about Heider and its practices. Violations could include immoral conduct, producing an abortion contrary to law, being unable to practice because of drug and alcohol use, and unprofessional conduct, to name a few.

“Before the Board can impose public discipline, it must be able to prove — by a preponderance of the evidence — that a physician violated the Medical Practice Act,” read the statement, sent by spokeswoman Jean Brinkley.

Only a small number of cases the board reviews meet that standard, the agency said. Just under 6% of the 3,770 cases the board closed in 2024 resulted in adverse public action, according to the board’s annual report.

The North Carolina medical board publishes public letters of concern, including the two sent to Heider, and disciplinary actions on its websites. But most of its actions occur out of public view.

The public can’t review complaints against doctors it receives, investigation results or many of the board’s communications with doctors and physician assistants. Protecting complaint subjects’ constitutional rights to due process and other legal requirements prevent much information from being made public, according to the board’s statement to the Observer.

The board’s lack of transparency has drawn criticism.

In 2023, the state auditor’s office said it was impossible for its staff to assess how well it evaluates complaints against doctors and physician assistants or investigates them. Citing a state law keeping much about its investigations confidential, the board gave auditors very limited access to its database listing 4,432 “investigations” between 2019 and 2021, its performance audit states.

“Legislators and the public have no way to know whether or how well the Board’s investigative process protected North Carolina citizens from harm, including malpractice and inappropriate behavior such as sexual assault,” the audit stated.

Trouble beyond patient accusations

While the medical board has disclosed only so much about Heider, public records reveal troubles in his personal life as early as 2017.

Heider had been out of town as his patients, freshly operated on, lay dying, say lawsuits filed by the families of both Tylor Savage and Lynnette York.

After briefly seeing York in the ICU around 1:30 p.m. the day after her surgery, Heider left to attend to a “personal matter out West, perhaps in Idaho,” according to the wrongful death lawsuit filed by York’s husband.

“Heider was in a custody battle with his ex-wife and chose to leave Lynnette York critically ill and without the necessary attendant care,” the suit alleged.

Heider and his wife of 20 years had separated in October 2017 and would later divorce, court records show. Over the next few years, the couple, who had four children together, had a contentious custody battle.

The month prior to York’s death, Heider had also left town right after Savage’s procedure, requiring another surgeon to treat her, the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Tylor’s parents alleged.

In an initial response to the lawsuit filed by Heider’s attorney, the surgeon denied he left town after Savage’s operation.

Two years later, Heider was, at least briefly, in trouble with the law. On April 12, 2023, the Cornelius Police Department executed a narcotics search warrant of Heider’s condo in Watermark Lake Norman. There, police found cocaine and LSD, according to a report from the Cornelius police that lists Heider and a woman described as his girlfriend as offenders.

Heider was arrested six days later on four felony possession counts for cocaine and Schedule I and Schedule III substances, and on one misdemeanor paraphernalia count, according to an Iredell County Sheriff’s arrest report obtained by the Observer through a public records request. He was also charged with one felony count of maintaining a residence for the purpose of using, storing or selling drugs, according to the report.

Those charges are not visible in state court records. An Iredell County news site reported that they were dropped. In such cases, that leads to automatic expungement of charges after 90 days in North Carolina. State law bars law enforcement and court officials from disclosing an expunged case to the public.

Heider’s mugshot and those charges, however, remain up on third-party websites, which aren’t subject to the state’s expungement laws.

The Observer asked if the medical board was aware of the arrest. Its written response said the board cannot comment on specific cases. The board does receive reports on licensee arrests, charges and convictions, it noted, but an arrest alone is not evidence of grounds for discipline under state law, the statement said.

Online reviews suggest signs of strain between Heider and his patients by 2018. Some patients still offered glowing ratings — but they had become the minority by at least 2020 on many forums.

Some online reviews posted between 2018 and early 2025 echoed allegations in patient lawsuits, a medical board complaint and interviews with the Observer, including that Heider did not provide satisfactory follow-up care when post-op complications developed.

Until early 2025, Heider saw patients at The Center for Surgical Weight Loss and admitted patients to Lake Norman Medical Center, according to an office staff member who answered the phone but did not give her name.

Heider stopped performing surgeries at what’s now Duke Health Lake Norman Hospital that March, a month before Duke took over, the staff member said.

He is currently assigned to emergency general surgery at Atrium Health Lincoln, a hospital spokeswoman said in an email. The spokeswoman declined to answer whether the health system was aware of Heider’s history as a defendant in multiple settled malpractice lawsuits before hiring him, or aware of a pending malpractice lawsuit.

Death, stomach loss for earlier patients

Not every patient who died after an operation by Heider had pursued weight loss surgery.

In August 2009, 72-year-old William Wilkie died at his home after Heider performed an emergency appendix removal on him but discharged him from Lake Norman Regional Medical Center without prescribing antibiotics, says a wrongful death lawsuit filed in June 2010 by Wilkie’s widow, Brenda.

Wilkie returned to the emergency room a few days later with signs of infection, including abdominal pain, a fever and low oxygen, but Heider again ordered his discharge without providing antibiotics, the lawsuit says.

Wilkie died at his Mooresville home three days later of sepsis, an autopsy found.

The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2011 for an unknown amount of money. Heider and his employers denied Wilkie’s claims in court records.

Heider should have assessed Wilkie for postoperative complications and given him antibiotics while he was waiting on culture results, the North Carolina Medical Board noted in a letter of concern on its website. The board took no action against Heider’s license to practice, despite the findings.

Some Heider patients who accused the surgeon of malpractice say they suffered life-altering complications, court records show.

Curtis Parker met Heider in March 2017. He’d been diagnosed with a serious type of hernia that was causing his stomach to bulge into his chest through his diaphragm, according to court records. His small intestine and esophagus had also migrated up.

At Heider’s suggestion, court records allege, Parker underwent both a hernia repair and a gastric sleeve procedure that April. Those surgeries would lead to a postoperative leak that wouldn’t resolve, strictures, a blockage, more than 60 days in the hospital, over $1 million in medical bills and complete stomach removal, Parker alleged in a March 2020 malpractice suit against Heider.

That would never have happened if Heider had performed a gastric bypass instead of a sleeve, the suit alleged. Sleeves can cause or worsen hiatal hernias.

Duke Health surgeon Dr. Dana Portenier took over Parker’s care after Heider’s operation. He said “he did not know of a bariatric surgeon anywhere in the country that would have performed gastric sleeve on Parker with such severe hiatal hernia as the one Parker suffered from,” the lawsuit says.

Harvard surgeon Dr. David Rattner, who Parker also consulted following his surgery by Heider, agreed he should have received a bypass, according to court records.

Heider and his employer denied liability and said Heider followed standards of care in court documents filed in response to Curtis Parker’s claims. Parker’s refusal to follow instructions not to consume anything by mouth was the cause of his leak persisting, they said.

Had the case proceeded to trial, at least two independent physicians had agreed to testify that Heider’s care deviated from standard treatments, court records show. But the case was settled during a November 2021 mediation session for an undisclosed amount of money.

A medical board review of the case — which is standard for reported payouts to malpractice lawsuits — did not result in public discipline, according to the board’s website.

Frustrated by response to serious complaints

People who agreed to speak with The Observer about lawsuits they filed against Heider and a medical board complaint say the outcomes were disappointing.

After Tylor Savage died, her parents hoped a trial in their wrongful death suit would bring some public scrutiny to Heider, but their attorneys advised settling since a costly malpractice case could drag on for years. The settlement forbids the family from disclosing details of the agreement.

“I wanted to go further, I wanted to put our house up for collateral,” Savage’s mom, Debora, said. “It’s just too hard to prosecute a doctor.”

The family finds ways to cope. Shawn Savage still talks to his late daughter, now gone nearly five years, every morning. He kisses the picture of her that hangs on the family fridge. For what would have been her 29th birthday on Dec. 15, 2023 he got his first tattoo: a portrait of his youngest daughter on his left forearm.

Albemarle resident Tawanna Chambers, who had an August 2024 gastric sleeve surgery performed by Heider, filed a complaint against him with the state medical board last July.

Chambers said she’s tried for months to hold Heider accountable after the operation led to two additional abdominal surgeries, multiple hospitalizations and chronic complications. The sleeve was “severely angled,” narrow and twisted, medical records reviewed by the Observer say.

Chambers reported Heider to the North Carolina Medical Board last July, complained to hospital administrators and tried for months to find a malpractice attorney to take her case. So far, none of those efforts have led to concrete action against Heider.

Chambers has become largely housebound. She’s developed neuropathy and hair loss from vitamin and mineral deficiencies and malnutrition, her medical records show, and struggles to keep food down at all.

Today, Chambers is skinny — unrecognizably so. Sunken cheeks, rail thin. Her once-solid figure now waifish. For the first time since she was 15, Chambers hasn’t been able to work.

“We don’t have our mom like we used to,” her daughter, Jacoury, said.

Chambers is waiting for the medical board to finish its investigation. An outside expert review of her case was completed as of mid-January, the board’s chief investigator told Chambers in an email, but needed to be reviewed by the board’s medical director office and legal team.

As Chambers waits, Heider is a named defendant in another medical malpractice suit.

In a complaint filed in April 2025, Mecklenburg County resident Sheikh Omar Tariq alleges that Heider failed to perform a leak test or imaging studies following his May 5, 2022 surgery at what was then Lake Norman Regional Medical Center. And that he failed to provide definitive treatment once a post-op leak was discovered.

That led to Tariq requiring “prolonged mechanical ventilation” and dialysis for an acute kidney injury, the lawsuit says.

Tariq was known to be at high risk for a leak, court documents say.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an investigative series examining patient care in North Carolina. If you have a story to share, contact Amber Gaudet at agaudet@charlotteobserver.com.