When Dr. Mark Chavez walked out of a Los Angeles federal courthouse on December 16, 2025, he wasn’t headed back to a hospital. According to his own lawyers, the former emergency room physician now earns his living driving for Uber. That detail came out in court the same day a judge handed him eight months of home confinement for his role in the ketamine death of “Friends” star Matthew Perry.
Chavez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine. He admitted he sold the drug to another doctor, who then passed it along to Perry in the weeks before the actor died. Here’s the strange part. Chavez never met Perry. He never set foot in his home. He never gave him a single injection. And yet his name is now permanently stitched into one of the saddest celebrity deaths in years. You can read the full sentencing breakdown here.
The sentence that caught people off guard
U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett gave Chavez eight months of home detention, three years of supervised release, and 300 hours of community service. He also paid a $100 special assessment to the government. He had faced up to 10 years in prison, so this was a long way from the worst case.
Why so light? The judge made it clear the actual dose that killed Perry did not come from Chavez. It came from other people charged in the case. She also noted that Chavez, unlike his co-defendant, was “less willing to keep going forward” once he learned Perry had a bad reaction on October 12, 2023. Prosecutors backed that up, saying he cooperated fully from the very beginning. Still, the judge didn’t let him off the hook entirely. “You and Mr. Plasencia helped Mr. Perry stay on the road of addiction that ultimately killed him,” she said, according to the court record.
From the ER to behind the wheel
Chavez’s defense leaned hard on the fall he had already taken. His attorneys said he spent 20 years working emergency rooms and helped a lot of people before all of this. They described how he “lost his profession, suffered public disgrace, and now earns a living as an Uber driver.” One attorney called it “a lapse in judgment during a narrow and isolated time.”
Here is the part that really lands. Chavez made roughly $5,000 off the entire scheme. His lawyer said that $5,000 “cost him his life and career.” He gave up his medical license on his own, before his detention hearing even took place. Outside the courthouse, he told reporters, “My heart goes out to the Perry family.” His defense attorney Matthew Binninger said, “We believe that this is a fair and just outcome for this case,” per local coverage of the hearing.
The text messages nobody can unsee
That cooperation looks a lot better when you read how these men actually talked about Perry behind the scenes. Court documents showed Chavez and the other doctor, Salvador Plasencia, mocking the actor over text. “I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia wrote. Chavez’s reply was short: “Lets find out.”
That single exchange tells you the spirit of the whole arrangement. Prosecutors also said Plasencia once told a patient that Perry was “too far gone and spiraling in his addiction.” Then he kept selling him drugs anyway. You can read more about what the texts revealed in the plea filings.
$12 in, $2,000 out
The money is where this gets really hard to stomach. Prosecutors said Perry was paying $2,000 for each vial of ketamine. His suppliers were paying about $12 per vial. That is not a markup. That is somebody emptying a sick man’s bank account with a prescription pad.
Chavez got his supply in an ugly way too. He wrote a fraudulent prescription in a patient’s name without her knowledge or consent, then sold those vials to Plasencia. In the single month before Perry died, the actor paid Plasencia up to $55,000 for ketamine. The indictment said the whole thing was “outside the usual course of professional practice and without a legitimate medical purpose,” according to prosecutors’ filings.
The doctor who actually got prison time
Chavez was not the first to be sentenced. Two weeks earlier, on December 3, 2025, Salvador Plasencia got two and a half years in federal prison and was taken into custody right there in the courtroom. The 44-year-old ran an urgent care clinic in Calabasas and pleaded guilty to four counts of distribution of ketamine. He had faced up to 40 years under his plea deal.
Plasencia distributed ketamine to Perry and his assistant on at least seven occasions in September and October 2023. He even taught Perry’s assistant, who had no medical training at all, how to inject the drug. His own lawyers admitted he “failed to protect Mr. Perry, a patient who was especially vulnerable due to addiction.” Perry’s mother, Suzanne, and his stepfather, Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison, wrote a statement aimed straight at him: “Matthew’s recovery counted on you saying NO.” They called him “among the most culpable of all,” as detailed in the court documents.
The other three names in the case
Five people were charged in all, and the sentencings stretched across about six months. The heaviest punishment went to Jasveen Sangha, the North Hollywood supplier the press nicknamed “The Ketamine Queen.” She got 15 years in federal prison in April 2026. When agents searched her home, they found around 79 vials of ketamine, roughly 3.1 pounds of methamphetamine pills, cocaine, and psilocybin mushrooms.
After Perry’s death hit the news, Sangha texted a co-defendant a two-word order: “Delete all our messages.” Prosecutors said her batch of ketamine, distributed on October 24, 2023, caused Perry’s death. Erik Fleming, who admitted he passed along that ketamine and got it from Sangha, was sentenced to two years. The federal investigation involved the LAPD, the DEA, and the Postal Inspection Service, according to the Justice Department.
The assistant who was supposed to keep him safe
The last person sentenced was the one closest to Perry. Kenneth Iwamasa, the actor’s live-in personal assistant, got three years and five months in May 2026. Perry had hired him in 2022 at a salary of $150,000 a year to live in his home and help him stay sober. Instead, prosecutors say Iwamasa became the drug messenger and the de facto doctor.
In Perry’s final days, Iwamasa was injecting him six to eight times a day. On October 28, 2023, he gave Perry a large dose and left to run errands. He came back to find the 54-year-old dead in the Jacuzzi behind his Pacific Palisades home. The family saved their sharpest words for him. “Matthew trusted Kenny. We trusted Kenny,” his mother wrote. “We trusted a man without a conscience, and my son paid the price.” His sister Caitlin said she has “no sympathy” for Iwamasa, according to her victim statement.
What this whole case adds up to
Strip away the celebrity, and it is a simple, ugly story. A man with a known addiction was surrounded by people who saw a paycheck instead of a patient. Two of them were doctors who took an oath. Two were dealers. One was a trusted friend on the payroll. Prosecutors put it plainly when they said the defendants “took advantage of Mr. Perry.”
The sentences ran from eight months at home all the way to 15 years behind bars. Chavez landed on the lightest end because he stopped early, cooperated, and never touched Perry himself. Now he drives strangers around San Diego for fares while the four others face years in prison or supervision. You can follow the full sentencing timeline here.
Whether eight months feels like justice probably depends on how you read his role. He made $5,000. Perry is gone. And a doctor who once worked emergency rooms for two decades will spend the rest of his life answering the same quiet question: was a few thousand dollars worth all of this?