Daily Mail
December 21, 2013
An ex-Ohio doctor was sentenced to 36 years in jail on Friday for the rape and involuntary manslaughter of an expectant mother forced into prostitution to support herself and two children.
Former ER doctor Ali Salim, 44, pleaded guilty to administering the fatal heroin overdose of Deanna Ballman, 23. Ballman was nine months pregnant with a girl she planned to call Mabel when she died.
Delaware County Judge Duncan Whitney said in sentencing him that the crime in July 2012 was the worst he’s ever seen and that it was unthinkable that as a man of medicine, Salim allowed her to die.
Salim had faced up to 37 years in prison. He was given nearly that with a sentence of 36 years and four months; a few months are likely to be subtracted because of time he’s already served.
When victim Ballman disappeared in July 2012, her family initially said she had answered a housekeeping ad on Craigslist.
Instead, investigators determined the 23-year-old woman had taken up prostitution when she moved back to Ohio after a divorce and with no financial means.
The ad she responded to: ‘$200 for a girl in need,’ an online euphemism for prostitution, assistant Delaware County prosecutor Kyle Rohrer said in a court filing last week.
‘That decision unknowingly but ultimately cost her and Mabel their lives,’ Rohrer said.
Ballman died of a fatal heroin overdose, which investigators say Salim administered at his house in an upscale central Ohio neighborhood. Rohrer says there is no evidence Ballman used drugs.