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Doctor obsessed with his own medical theories accused of poisoning wife on NYC visit
By
Samantha Max
Published Oct 25, 2023
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By
Samantha Max
Published Oct 25, 2023
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A doctor obsessed with his own non-traditional medical theories claims he was trying to cure his ailing wife when he rejected the advice of other medical professionals and instead treated her with copious amounts of a mineral called selenium. But after she died in 2018, Manhattan prosecutors charged him with poisoning her.
A jury will now decide if Jeffrey Harris is guilty of manslaughter and whether he should spend up to 15 years in prison.
In closing arguments that spanned two days in New York Supreme Criminal Court, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued that Harris provided his wife Tammy with reckless medical care. Harris’s attorney said his client was acting stubbornly out of love for his spouse, who herself resisted traditional forms of medical care.
“You don’t get to be so sure of your ideas that you watch your wife whither away and die in front of you,” Assistant District Attorney Heather Pearson told the jury.
Harris sat quietly throughout the closing arguments and mostly looked ahead, though he occasionally glanced toward the jurors or back at the gallery, where more than a dozen onlookers listened in. He was dressed in a suit with a patterned tie, his salt and pepper hair combed to the side and black, square-framed glasses resting on his nose.
Prosecutors said Harris fatally poisoned his wife during a 2018 trip to New York City to visit ta practice in Murray Hill that touts itself as a “complementary medicine” center. Over the years, Western acceptance has steadily grown for alternative and complementary medicine, and the National Institutes of Health even has a center now for studying it. But prosecutors called medical experts who said too much selenium can be toxic.
Tammy Harris, 55, died at Lenox Hill Hospital several days after losing consciousness at a hotel, according to court testimony. The city medical examiner’s office discovered levels of a mineral called selenium in her body that far exceeded the recommended amount, according to the DA’s office.
Prosecutors said Harris had been giving his wife a dangerous dose of selenium for months to treat the symptoms of what other doctors believed was lupus — a diagnosis that Jeffrey Harris repeatedly rejected. They said he was convinced his wife had elevated levels of mercury in her body — a theory they said was disproved by multiple tests — and gave her excessive amounts of selenium, as well as a host of other supplements.
The assistant district attorney said Harris used his wife as a test subject to prove the medical establishment wrong, in the hopes that a positive outcome would help him to open his own nontraditional medicine center.
But as his wife’s condition continued to deteriorate, prosecutors said, Harris doubled down on his experimental treatments, even as his attempts caused crippling side effects, including hair loss, finger nail splitting, muscle atrophy and excessive weight loss.
At one point, Tammy Harris weighed 77 pounds, Pearson said in court as she showed a bar graph of her decline in weight over time. During closing arguments, prosecutors showed photos of a tiny, frail woman, her bony body laid across her bed.
“This is no way to treat a human being,” Pearson said. “It’s trial and error. It’s an absolute experiment.”
Pearson said Harris, a doctor, knew the risk of giving his wife so much selenium and showed text messages in which he said his wife was taking four times the upper limit of the substance and that his colleagues would be “appalled” at the amount of selenium he was having her take. In an email that Pearson showed, Harris said selenium could be toxic. The prosecutor also said Harris Googled selenium toxicity twice, and then later deleted the internet searches.
“He recklessly chose to disregard every rule and every limit,” she said.
Prosecutors described Harris as controlling and said he tried to prevent his wife’s daughters from taking her to the hospital in the months leading up to her death. When Tammy Harris did see traditional doctors, Pearson said, her husband lied to them about the supplements she was taking and even snuck them into the hospital.
‘He was trying to save her’
Harris’ defense attorney, Jason Goldman, said his client was “misguided,” but that he loved his wife and did not mean to kill her.
“He was trying to save her,” Goldman said during his closing statement, which went on for about five hours. “He was convinced that he was.”
Goldman said his client is not a perfect person — that he is stubborn and regularly butted heads with doctor’s who didn’t agree with his medical theory. But he said the trial “is not a personality or popularity contest” and urged jurors not to convict Harris “because he didn’t fit in with the crowd.”
“I want you to ask yourself if not liking him is reason enough to not convict him,” he said.
Harris’ attorney also disputed prosecutors’ claims that his client was using his wife as his “ticket to the big leagues” in the nontraditional medical field. As Goldman said this, Harris looked down and shook his head.
“He wanted to trade places with her,” the attorney said, adding that his client was suicidal after his wife’s death.
Goldman argued Tammy Harris had been ill long before her death, citing text messages and medical records that described an array of symptoms over the years.
He said Tammy Harris, a nurse, shared her husband’s passion for nontraditional medicine and that the two had traveled together to China to learn more. Casting Jeffrey Harris as the controlling doctor who made all the decisions would discredit her own knowledge and beliefs, Goldman said.
“If you want to do justice to Tammy in this case, listen to her voice,” he said.
Goldman said there would be no winner in this case, regardless of the verdict. But he asked them not to hold Harris accountable for the death of the woman he loved.
“A verdict of not guilty means that you’re not turning one tragedy into another,” he said.
Jurors are expected to begin deliberating Thursday.
Tagged
public safety
manhattan
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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