Florida doctor arrested after surgery error killed Alabama patient

A Florida surgeon was arrested in Miramar Beach after a grand jury said a preventable operating-room mistake helped kill William Bryan, a 70-year-old Navy veteran from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Deputies approached Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky with guns drawn as he sat in a vehicle carrying Lyft passengers, a stark image of how a medical case became a criminal one.

Walton County prosecutors charged Shaknovsky with second-degree manslaughter in Bryan’s August 21, 2024 death, alleging that he removed Bryan’s liver instead of his spleen during a scheduled laparoscopic splenectomy at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast. The procedure caused catastrophic blood loss and ended with Bryan dying on the operating table. Shaknovsky was taken into custody on April 14, 2026, and later released on $75,000 bond ahead of a May 19 court hearing.

The case has sharpened attention on what happened before the arrest. A court filing says Bryan initially wanted to return to Alabama before surgery but was pressured to proceed. It also says Shaknovsky kept operating after Bryan went into cardiac arrest and later blamed the death on a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm, an explanation the autopsy did not support. Beverly Bryan has filed a civil lawsuit, arguing that Shaknovsky repeatedly insisted the removed organ was the spleen even as staff questioned him.

State regulators had already moved against Shaknovsky months earlier. Florida officials issued an emergency order in September 2024 suspending his osteopathic license, citing another alleged surgical error in 2023 and a wrong-site hernia surgery in 2024. NBC reporting says his Florida license was suspended in 2024 and his New York license in 2025, raising questions about why a doctor under such scrutiny was still able to operate long enough for criminal charges to follow.

The fallout has spread beyond the courtroom. Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast said Shaknovsky was never its employee and had not practiced at its facilities since August 2024. The U.S. Army Reserve said he had not provided military surgical services since 2021 and that it took immediate action after learning of the incident. First Coast News reported that Shaknovsky is a decorated Army Reserve lieutenant colonel with the 946th Medical Detachment who deployed to Iraq in 2020.

For Bryan’s family, the case has become a painful test of whether hospitals, licensing boards, and regulators move fast enough when a surgeon’s record raises red flags. For health authorities, it is a reminder that patient safety failures do not end in the operating room.