Grand jury brings manslaughter charge over fatal 2024 operation where patient died on table
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 (193km) 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.
Reading that is just insane. The surgeon wrote a fictional surgery report where he stated that he converted the laparoscopy into a normal surgery because the spleen was enlarged and then during the removal of the spleen there was an aneurysm that burst and the patient bled to death because of that. A pathologist was sent the liver in a box labeled “spleen” which he noticed instantly that it wasn’t a spleen.
When they autopsied the patient the Medical Examiner found that the spleen was still inside the patient, basically untouched and there was no sign of the aforementioned aneurysm. The Medical Examiner also found that the liver was missing and that it has been cleanly dissected off the diaphragm which they stated that it was quite hard to learn how to do. They stated “Essentially the liver was autopsied out of that man”. They noticed that there was no evidence of suturing or clamping and the surgeon just dissected the Inferior Vena Cava. The medical examiner also found that the spleen of the patient weighed 420 grams while a typical liver is between 1800 and 2800 grams, they also said that the largest spleen they have seen weighed 800 grams, still nowhere close to the weight of a liver.
They interviewed the nurses and other OR staff and one of them states that at one point a different surgeon walked in and stated: “that looks like the liver to me” and the operating surgeon just said “no, that’s the spleen”.