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Boot Camp Medical Examiner Appeals
Removal August 17, 2007
 At
their meeting on Wednesday, the Florida Medical Examiners Commission
reviewed the petition filed by District 14 medical examiner Dr.
Charles Siebert appealing their June determination to remove him
from his post in Bay County and five other Panhandle Counties and a
probable cause panel’s decision that he had violated state law.
The removal vote by MEC, the result
of Siebert’s handling of the autopsy in the death of 14-year-old
Martin Lee Anderson at a boot camp in Panama City, had come a month
after the MEC had voted not to recommend that Siebert’s appointment
be renewed when it expired on June 30.
Siebert was formally served with
the removal order on July 10 and filed his petition for a formal
administrative hearing on July 24. No date has been set for the
hearing. Siebert has denied the allegations against him and said he
conducted a proper autopsy.
 Efforts
are underway to find a new medical examiner for the Fourteenth
District. State Attorney Steve Meadows appointed Siebert to serve as
the interim ME on June 19.
Siebert had made a determination
that Anderson had died of complications from sickle cell trait which
had not been previously diagnosed.
However, a second autopsy performed
by Hillsborough medical examiner Vernard Adams following an
exhumation indicated that the teen didn’t die from natural causes
but rather as the result of suffocation at the hands of the boot
camp guards when ammonia capsules were shoved up his nose.
Anderson’s family had refused to
accept Siebert’s findings and charged that a cover up existed in the
boy’s death after they viewed a videotape of the boot camp incident.
Siebert continues to stand by his original determination.
The Florida Legislature approved
and Crist signed a $5 million settlement for the Anderson family.
Seven guards and a nurse employed
at the camp face manslaughter charges.
Last August, by a 4-1 vote, the
commission had recommended that Siebert be placed on supervised
probation for the 10 months remaining on his contract with the
county. Siebert, who earns approximately $180,000 a year, has had to
pay for someone to oversee his work since that time.
Last year, after then Attorney
General Charlie Crist asked the commission to investigate autopsies
conducted by Siebert that may have contained “fundamental flaws”, a
three member probable cause panel of the commission ruled that
Siebert had been negligent in performing at least 35 of the nearly
700 autopsies reviewed, finding that Siebert “failed to perform the
duties required of a medical examiner”. Siebert has maintained that
any errors that he committed were only minor and weren’t
intentional. At last month’s commission meeting, the panel reviewed
the events which had led up to Siebert’s suspension.
The MEC filed a four count
administrative complaint against Siebert on July 10, seeking his
immediate removal from office, saying that he had lied about the
work performed in the Anderson autopsy. The committee found that
Siebert had made material misrepresentations in the Anderson autopsy
regarding the thyroid gland and adrenal glands and levied negligence
allegations against Siebert in regard to his examination of the
groin area and subcutaneous hemorrhages on the thighs and right
forearm of Anderson.
Siebert says he did remove and
inspect thyroid gland and adrenal glands and found nothing
remarkable. He says in regard to his examination of the groin area,
he exercised is professional discretion to not dissect the prostate
gland and testes because dissection was not necessary to allow him
to establish a cause of death.
He argues that he didn’t flay
Anderson’s skin because it was evidence from the video that bruising
would be existent in those areas but not responsible for the cause
of death and to limit damage to Anderson’s body pending his funeral.
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