Surgeon Accused of Removing Wrong Organ Faces Manslaughter Charge

A grand jury indicted Florida surgeon Thomas Shaknovsky, DO, on a second-degree manslaughter charge for allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen during a 2024 surgery.

Prosecutors said that during a surgery on Aug. 21, 2024, which was scheduled to be a laparoscopic splenectomy, Shaknovsky removed 70-year-old William Bryan’s liver. That resulted in “catastrophic blood loss and the patient’s death on the operating table,” law enforcement officials wrote in a press release on Monday.

“Our duty is to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favor,” Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson said in a statement.

Florida suspended Shaknovsky’s medical license a month after the surgery on Bryan, of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Records show Shaknovsky voluntarily surrendered his medical license in Alabama after regulators there moved to revoke his license.

Bryan’s widow, Beverly Bryan, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Shaknovsky, the hospital, and the health system last year. They were told that Bryan had died of a splenic artery aneurysm, and that the spleen was sent to pathology. However, a pathologist report stated that there was “no splenic tissue identified.” Instead, the pathologist wrote that it was a “grossly identifiable 2,106 g liver.”

The pathologist notified the medical examiner, who conducted an autopsy, confirming that Bryan still had his spleen but was missing his liver, according to earlier reporting by MedPage Today.

The emergency suspension order against Shaknovsky’s license in Florida reported that he severed Bryan’s inferior vena cava, the vessel that connects the liver with the heart, “resulting in the bleeding event that precipitated his death.”

It also documented that Shaknovsky had removed a portion of a patient’s pancreas when he was supposed to remove an adrenal gland a year prior to the Bryan incident.

Bryan’s widow previously told reporters that her husband’s death was “unnecessary and brutal.” When previously asked what she hoped would come of the lawsuit, she said it would be that the “culture of silence around medical events is broken, and that [hospitals] will be more transparent when things like this happen.”

A request for comment to Bryan’s attorney from the civil lawsuit was not returned as of press time. Available court records did not name an attorney for Shaknovsky.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.