Donald Trump’s nominee for US surgeon general – Dr Janette Nesheiwat – accidentally knocked over a gun when she was 13 years old, causing it to fire and fatally shoot her father in the head.
The death of Nesheiwat’s father occurred in February 1990 at her family home in Umatilla, Florida, as reported on Friday by the New York Times.
“I was in Father’s bedroom at about 7.15am getting some scissors” out of a fishing tackle box on a shelf above her dad’s bed, she said, according to a police report reviewed by the New York Times. “I opened the … box and the whole thing tipped over”, causing a handgun to fall from inside, discharge and strike her father in the head as he slept in the bed.
Nesheiwat’s father, who immigrated from Jordan, died in a hospital the following day.
While avoiding discussing her role in the case, she has said her father’s death inspired her to become a doctor. Nesheiwat has spent the past 15 years as an urgent care doctor for CityMD, a for-profit chain of clinics around New York City.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, she began appearing regularly on Fox News as a medical contributor.
Nesheiwat would replace Dr Vivek Murthy if her nomination is confirmed after Trump begins his second presidency.
Murthy was the first US surgeon general to declare gun violence as a public health crisis. In an advisory, he cited that firearms are now the leading cause of death in the US among children and adolescents.
A graphic accompanying the advisory explained how many of those deaths were unintentional, resulting from firearms that were stored loaded as well as unlocked.
To address the crisis, Murthy called on the US to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict use in public spaces and penalize individuals who fail to safely store their weapons.
Republicans have opposed efforts to treat gun violence as a public health issue, with House Republicans voting in 2023 to ban the Center for Disease Control from researching gun violence. Republicans have also pushed to prevent public health agencies from citing public health emergencies to pass gun control measures and has attempted to defund programs aimed at gun violence reduction.
Murthy was dismissed from his role as US surgeon general by Trump during his first presidency in 2017 before outgoing Joe Biden appointed him to the position again in 2021.
The New York Times reported that a Nesheiwat memoir being published later in December mentions her father’s death in the first sentence.
“When I was 13 years old, I helplessly watched my dear father dying from an accident as blood was spurting everywhere,” she writes in Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine. “I couldn’t save his life.
“This was the start of my personal journey in life to become a physician and enter the world of healing arts.”
But, according to the New York Times, nowhere in the next 260 pages of the book does she detail how her father died or say that he was shot.
The Orlando Sentinel provided more detail in 1990, describing in a news item how a bullet hit Ziad “Ben” Nesheiwat in the head and killed him after his 13-year-old daughter knocked over a tackle box, causing a gun to fall out and fire.
“As she says in her book, she became a physician because of her dad’s tragic accidental death,” a spokesman for Trump’s transition team, Brian Hughes, said in a statement to the New York Times after Nesheiwat did not respond for comment. “She became a physician to save lives, and that dedication to the lives of her fellow Americans is why president Trump nominated Dr Nesheiwat to be our next surgeon general.
“She and her family miss their father, and hope he’s proud of them.”