MIRAMAR BEACH — Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky was arrested and charged after prosecutors said he accidentally removed a patient's liver instead of his spleen during surgery at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast in Miramar Beach, Florida. The patient, 70-year-old William Bryan, died following the operation.

Bryan's death occurred about a year after another of Shaknovsky's patients, Dorothy Dorsett, died following surgery at the same hospital. Dorsett was admitted on July 24, 2023, after suffering abdominal pain and was diagnosed with gastrointestinal bleeding and acute blood loss anemia, according to a civil complaint.

On July 27, 2023, Shaknovsky performed a colonoscopy on Dorsett, found a tumor in her digestive tract and removed it, according to the complaint. A lawsuit filed by her son, Weyman Dorsett, states that she was hardly eating and had an abnormally fast heartbeat after the surgery, and was moved to the ICU nearly a week later. She died on August 4, 2023.

Weyman Dorsett filed a lawsuit against Shaknovsky and Ascension Sacred Heart last year, accusing them of negligence. The case remains ongoing. In court filings, Shaknovsky denied wrongdoing in Dorothy Dorsett's case, stating that some allegations were inaccurate and that descriptions of her care were incomplete. Macdonald Walker, a spokesperson for Ascension Sacred Heart, said that Shaknovsky was never a Sacred Heart Emerald Coast employee and has not practiced at any of their facilities since August 2024.

Weyman Dorsett spoke publicly for the first time since his mother's death in a Thursday interview. He said his mother had been active, lived independently and was in good health before her surgery, and had flown to Bentonville, Arkansas, for her oldest son's wedding despite having a broken leg from a car wreck. He said Shaknovsky prayed by her bedside before the operation.

"I'll never forget and it'll never leave my mind, the look on that doctor's face as he was reading through the files. He was just shaking his head, like: 'what in the living hell is going on?'" Weyman Dorsett said. "It's just not right."