A teenager wearing a lab coat, stethoscope and face mask posed as a doctor at a south Florida medical center for a month, before police put an end to the ruse on Tuesday. Police and the center announced on Friday that they would not pursue charges against the boy.
The Sun Sentinel first reported the story, after obtaining a police report dated 13 January which related how staff told West Palm police of a doctor walking the halls who “appeared to be a child”.
The suspicious physician wore a white St Mary’s lab coat with “anesthesiology” on the front, a patient told medical center staff, according to the incident report. Guards told police the young man had been known at the center for a month and had entered secured access areas.
“Multiple people”, the report reads, saw the teenager “walking around the hospital for approximately one month pretending to be a doctor”.
Nurses and a doctor said the teen hovered inside an OB/GYN office while an actual physician examined a patient. The doctor, Sebastian Kent, had never seen the boy before and felt something was wrong. Kent called security and later found a note in his office asking whether the mysterious medic could “shadow” him, the report says.
Footage caught by security cameras and described in the report does not show the boy “entering any rooms or seeing any patients”, although he does wander the halls at length.
Police confronted the teenager as he tried to leave one of the center’s buildings with his cousin, according to the report. Confronted by the authorities, he told police he had worked as a doctor for years.
The report redacted the teenager’s name and age, though medical center officials told WSVN news he was 17. Police were told by the teen’s mother that he lives with an illness, not identified in the report, and refuses to take medicine prescribed by his own doctor.
St Mary’s released a statement that said the teen “never had any contact with any hospital patients and did not gain access to any patient care areas of the hospital at any time”.
West Palm Beach police conclude in their report that the boy had committed no crime, and medical center officials said on Friday they would not pursue charges.
The unidentified teen is not the first to masquerade as a doctor in Florida. In 2012, a 17-year-old named Michael Scheidt was arrested for impersonating a medical assistant for five days, after donning scrubs, hoodwinking HR into giving him a badge, and dressing the wounds of a patient.
Scheidt was also arrested about a year later for impersonating a Miami Beach police officer.
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