Florida surgeon indicted after removing liver instead of spleen, killing patient

A planned spleen operation at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital turned into a fatal test of basic safeguards, after prosecutors said Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky removed William Bryan’s liver instead of his spleen and caused catastrophic blood loss. The surgery was scheduled as a laparoscopic splenectomy for Bryan, a 70-year-old from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, who became ill while visiting a rental property in Okaloosa County, Florida. Bryan died on the operating table on Aug. 21, 2024.

The indictment returned by a Walton County grand jury in April 2026 pushed the case from a medical catastrophe into a criminal charge, with Shaknovsky accused of second-degree manslaughter. He was arrested in Miramar Beach on April 14, 2026, and later released on $75,000 bond after his first court appearance. By then, his Florida medical license had already been suspended, his New York license was suspended in 2025, and the Alabama Medical Licensure Commission accepted the surrender of his Alabama license in November 2024 after regulators moved to revoke it.

The Bryan family says the breakdown began before the first incision, when William Bryan initially refused surgery and wanted to return to Alabama. According to the family account, he was pressured into changing his mind. After the operation, Beverly Bryan said Shaknovsky told her husband had died from a ruptured spleen or a ruptured splenic aneurysm. The autopsy later showed no evidence of a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm, and the removed liver specimen was reportedly mislabeled as a spleen. State records also say Shaknovsky continued operating even after Bryan went into cardiac arrest, then later claimed he had removed an organ he believed was the spleen but could not properly identify it because of shock and chaos.

The case now spotlights the layers of review that are supposed to stop a wrong-organ removal before it becomes irreversible. In the operating room, the team is expected to confirm the procedure, verify the organ, and stop a dangerous mismatch when it appears. In the hospital chain of command, colleagues are expected to challenge an error in real time. State discipline is supposed to provide another barrier. Instead, each layer appears to have failed before a grand jury ever acted.

Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson said investigators from his office, the state attorney’s office, and state medical authorities followed the facts “without fear or favor.” Beverly Bryan, a longtime registered nurse, said she still struggles to believe what happened, saying it sounds “too awful to be true.”