A Walton County grand jury indicted Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, on a second-degree manslaughter charge Monday after prosecutors said he removed a 70-year-old Alabama man's liver instead of his spleen during surgery last August, a mistake that caused catastrophic blood loss and killed the patient on the operating table.
Shaknovsky was taken into custody Monday morning and transported to the Walton County Jail, where he awaits his first court appearance. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison, Fox News reported.
The patient, William Bryan, had checked into Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital in Miramar Beach while visiting the Florida Panhandle with his wife. He came in with lower left abdominal pain. Doctors suspected a spleen abnormality and admitted him for further testing, but Bryan declined surgery, wanting to return home to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
He never made it home. Shaknovsky allegedly urged Bryan to undergo a spleen removal, and Bryan eventually relented.
The procedure was scheduled as a laparoscopic splenectomy, a routine, minimally invasive operation to remove the spleen. What allegedly happened next was anything but routine. The New York Post reported that Shaknovsky converted the procedure to an open surgery, then allegedly snipped and stapled vessels around Bryan's liver rather than his spleen, triggering severe hemorrhage and cardiac arrest.
Bryan was pronounced dead. His death was later ruled a homicide due to "liver removed during splenectomy," according to the family's lawyer.
The removed liver weighed 4.6 pounds. Operating-room staff recognized what it was immediately.
A witness in the operating room described the scene in an emergency suspension order. Staff "looked at the readily identifiable liver on the table and were shocked when Dr. Shaknovsky told them it was the spleen," the witness said. One staff member "felt sick to their stomach."
The suspension order also stated that Shaknovsky allegedly asked staff to label the liver as a "spleen" and send it to pathology, a request that, if true, suggests an attempt to conceal the error rather than correct it. Staff in the room, the order noted, "felt that Dr. Shaknovsky was attempting to convince them that this is what occurred, even though they witnessed something different."
Shaknovsky allegedly continued dissecting the abdomen after the hemorrhage began and did not call for assistance. He later insisted Bryan died of a splenic artery aneurysm, a claim contradicted by what operating-room staff say they saw.
His medical license was suspended following the incident. Fox News reported that his licenses were suspended in multiple states and that regulators cited a prior similar surgical error and alleged dishonesty about it, raising the question of how a surgeon with that kind of record was still operating on patients.
The case is one of several recent high-profile criminal matters drawing national attention. In another serious criminal case that made headlines, a Maryland man was charged with attempted murder after allegedly appearing at a federal official's home with a manifesto.
Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson addressed the indictment in a statement that emphasized the gravity of the charges and the process that produced them.
"The grand jury has spoken, and our responsibility is to ensure the charges are carried out through the proper legal process. Our thoughts remain with the victim's family and their unspeakable loss. We are committed to seeing this case through with the professionalism and integrity our community expects."
Adkinson also said the investigation was guided by principle, not politics.
"Our duty is to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favor."
The AP confirmed the surgery took place on August 21, 2024, and that Shaknovsky's medical license was also surrendered in Alabama.
William Bryan was 70 years old. He walked into a hospital with abdominal pain. He was talked into a procedure he initially refused. He was operated on by a surgeon who, regulators later found, had a prior history of concern. And he left that operating room dead, with the wrong organ removed from his body.
His wife was with him on what was supposed to be a trip to the Florida Panhandle. She went home without him.
The indictment is a start. But the deeper questions remain unanswered. Who cleared Shaknovsky to operate at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast despite whatever prior record regulators later flagged? What institutional safeguards failed? And why did a patient who said no to surgery end up on the table at all?
Second-degree manslaughter carries up to 15 years. That is the legal ceiling. The moral accounting, for the hospital, for the licensing system, for every layer of oversight that let this surgeon near a patient, has barely begun.
When a man trusts a doctor with his life and that doctor allegedly removes the wrong organ, tries to relabel it, and blames the death on something else entirely, the system didn't just fail. It failed at every checkpoint that was supposed to prevent exactly this.
