Doogie Howser Imposter Caught By OB/GYN Staff
By: Doogie Howser may be a fictitious character on television, but one teen was an actual imposter in a gynecologist examining room in Florida. The 17-year-old teen told the St. Mary’s Medical Center staff that he was a real doctor. USA Today reports that the teen was dressed in a white lab coat with a hospital logo and a stethoscope around his neck.
“The West Palm Beach police report says numerous hospital employees had seen the teen in the halls for weeks and believed he was a doctor,” the site said.
The teen’s game of playing a doctor quickly became unraveled after a female patient alerted OB/GYN staffers that “a young black male who appeared to be a child was dressed as a doctor” and was inside a nearby examination room.
The Smoking Gun said the teen was a Doogie Howser wannabe. “Hospital workers told police that the teenager was inside an exam room while an actual doctor, Sebastian Kent, conducted a patient examination.” It’s amazing that the teen got away with it for so long before security personnel caught on to him.
The teen’s mother apologized for the incident and told police that her son is “under the care of a doctor” and refuses to take prescribed medicine. Cops detained the boy while trying to leave the medical facility. Officials declined to pursue charges against the teen.
Things even got more interesting when one doctor received a note from the imposter asking him if he could “shadow” the physician on his rounds. The physician approached the cops when he found out there was someone in the outpatient facility pretending to be an OB/GYN. A St. Mary’s spokesperson denied that the teen actually made contact with patients.
However, this isn’t Doogie Howser’s only offense. Police spoke to officials at another hospital nearby, the Good Samaritan Medical Center, and their security director, Karen Kingsmill, recounted an incident that involved a “younger black male dressed as a doctor walking out of the Emergency Room entrance last week.”
Kingsmill added that she “did not recognize him as being a doctor and thought it was suspicious he was hanging around near the ‘secured area’ doors.” A review of security footage revealed the suspect “walking around the Emergency Room lobby in a white lab coat” on January 7. A search of the Honda Odyssey that the teenager drove to St. Mary’s turned up a “white size 36 lab coat on a clothes hanger” and a “black doctor or nurse scrub-style top, size medium.”
