Florida surgeon indicted after removing liver instead of spleen

A surgeon in Florida has been indicted for manslaughter after he wrongly removed a patient’s liver instead of his spleen during an August 2024 procedure.

Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, was indicted by a grand jury in Tallahassee on Monday after prosecutors said he botched the surgery of 70-year-old William Bryan, of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The jury of the first judicial circuit heard that Shaknovsky, of DeFuniak Springs, 120 miles west of Tallahassee, had been scheduled to perform an operation called a laparoscopic splenectomy on the patient, but instead cut out the man’s liver.

The consequence was “catastrophic blood loss and the patient’s death on the operating table”, according to a press release from Michael Adkinson, the Walton county sheriff.

Thomas Shaknovsky was indicted on Monday in Tallahassee after prosecutors said he botched the surgery of 70-year-old William Bryan. Photograph: Walton County Sheriff’s Office

Shaknovsky was taken into custody in Miramar Beach, Florida, on Monday morning and taken to the Walton county jail ahead of a scheduled first court appearance on Tuesday, the sheriff said.

Court filings, and an emergency order of license suspension by the Florida department of health less than a month after Bryan’s death, detailed how Shaknovsky allegedly insisted that he press on with the operation at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast in Miramar Beach even after it was obvious he had made a mistake.

“Dr Shaknovsky removed an organ he believed to be the spleen, but due to his shock and the chaos, he was unable to properly identify the organ,” prosecutors said.

The license suspension order signed by Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, said that Shaknovsky told investigators he had not been able to control an aneurysm which caused Bryan’s chest cavity to fill with blood, “but instead decided to complete the splenectomy in a last-ditch effort to control the bleeding after the patient had been in cardiac arrest for 15 minutes”.