It never came.

This week, nearly seven months after Dr. Luyao’s first trial ended with a hung jury, attorneys attempted to find six new people to determine the ending to her nearly four-year-old case, according to the Palm Beach Post.

The jurors were asked to decide whether the 64-year-old grandmother, who worked as a doctor in the county since 1977, is guilty of six counts of manslaughter, six counts of trafficking painkillers; and one count of racketeering. She’s accused of issuing excessive prescriptions for powerful pain pills, including OxyContin.

The six patients at the center of her case were at different stages of their lives and hailed from every county between Broward and Indian River when each died unexpectedly:

The original jurors listened to four weeks of testimony about Dr. Luyao’s career as a physician, and attorneys gave them more than 200 exhibits to take back to the jury room. But those six St. Lucie County residents could not reach a unanimous verdict on any of the 13 charges against Dr. Luyao.

Some relatives of Dr. Luyao’s former patients have said they hope to see a resolution after the second attempt.

“The waiting has been so hard,” said Connie Velie, the mother of victim Tina Smith. “There’s too many memories brought back up. You have to relive everything all over again.”

Although the facts of the case and potential witnesses haven’t appeared to change much, a few of the ground rules have: A different retired circuit judge will preside over Dr. Luyao’s new trial, and attorneys on both sides are under a gag order and barred from talking to the media about the case.

Last year, when the case hadn’t been in the public eye for months, lawyers were able to seat a jury after only a day-and-a-half. This time, after the first trial garnered extensive media coverage, officials say it probably will take a few days longer. Clerks have summoned a pool of 100 potential jurors for Tuesday.

Fearing she won’t find an impartial jury in her home county, Dr. Luyao’s attorney has asked to move the trial to another county. But Senior Judge Dwight Geiger said the lawyers must attempt to find six fair jurors in St. Lucie County before he will consider the request.

If they do get a jury, Geiger has set aside nearly a month to hear the case.

When Dr. Luyao was arrested in 2002, she was one of the first doctors in the nation to be charged in the overdose deaths of her patients. During her first trial, prosecutors said greed drove Dr. Luyao to stop functioning as a medical doctor. They argued that she had essentially become “a drug dealer with a prescription pad” and accused Dr. Luyao of running a “pill mill” in her office in the old Village Green shopping plaza.

Her goal, Assistant State Attorney Erin Kirkwood said, was to keep patients addicted so they would continue to pay a required $80 fee for each return visit required for a refill.

Throughout the first trial, defense attorney Joel Hirschhorn maintained that Dr. Luyao always acted in good faith, but her drug-seeking patients lied to her and manipulated her.

She might not have been a good judge of character, he said, but she was a caring doctor who did not cause the deaths of those six patients.

“She did what she thought in her own professional judgment was best,” Hirschhorn told the jury last year. “She might not have been right, but that certainly doesn’t mean she was criminally liable.”

Prosecutors again are expected to call several of Dr. Luyao’s former patients to testify against her. Some of those patients told the jury that she had a reputation on the streets as a doctor who would give patients whatever they asked for, with few questions asked.

One patient said the price of the painkiller OxyContin on the street quadruped after Dr. Luyao’s license was suspended.

Others said they went to Dr. Luyao with legitimate pain and ended up getting addicted.

Whereas Kirkwood said Dr. Luyao ignored obvious signs of addiction and continued to provide prescriptions, Hirschhorn painted a different description of those patients.

“Dr. Luyao’s patients were relentless in their lies to her,” Hirschhorn said during closing arguments of her first trial. “Dr. Luyao was a sucker for a sad story.”