Donald Trumpnamed for the US surgeon general – Dr Janette Nesheiwat – accidentally knocked over a gun when he was 13 years old, causing it to fire and fatally shoot his father in the head.
Nesheiwat’s father died in February 1990 at his family home in Umatilla, Florida announced Friday by the New York Times.
“I was in Father’s room at about 7:15 getting scissors” from a fishing box on the shelf above his father’s bed, he said, according to a police report reviewed by the New York Times. “I opened the box and it was all nailed down,” causing the handgun to fall from inside and hit the father in the head while he was sleeping in bed.
Nesheiwat’s father, who emigrated from Jordan, died in hospital the following day.
While denying his role in the case, he said his father’s death inspired him to become a doctor. Nesheiwat spent the past 15 years as an urgent care physician for CityMD, a for-profit clinic chain based in New York City.
In the beginning Covid 19 pandemic, he began appearing regularly on Fox News as a medical contributor.
Nesheiwat would replace Dr Vivek Murthy if his nomination is confirmed after Trump begins his second term as president.
Murthy was the first US surgeon general to declare gun violence a public health crisis. In an advisoryin the US, guns are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.
A graphics He explained to the counselor who accompanied him how many of those deaths were inadvertent, from guns which had been stored and then loaded unlocked.
To address the crisis, Murthy he called in the US to ban automatic firearms, introduce universal means for purchasing firearms, regulate the industry, pass laws that would control their use in public spaces and punish people who cannot safely store their weapons.
Republicans have resisted efforts to address gun violence as a public safety issue, with House Republicans voting in 2023 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be disqualified from researching gun violence. Republicans have it too pushed prevent public safety agencies from state public safety accidents to pass gun control measures and these effort programs aimed at reducing gun violence.
Murthy was dismissed from his role as US surgeon general by Trump during his first term as president in 2017 before Joe Biden appointed him to the position again in 2021.
The New York Times reported that a comment Nesheiwat published later in December mentioned his father’s death in the first sentence.
“When I was 13 years old, I watched helplessly as my dearest father died from an accident, blood gushing everywhere,” he writes in Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine. “I could not save his life.
“This was the beginning of my personal journey to become a doctor and enter the world of healthy arts.”
But, according to the New York Times, nowhere in the following 260 pages of the book does he explain how his father died or say that he was shot.
Orlando Police provided more detail in 1990, describing in a news release how a bullet struck Ziad “Ben” Nesheiwat in the head and killed him after a 13-year-old boy in a tackle box knocked him out, causing the gun to drop and fire.
“As she says in her book, she became a doctor because of the tragic death of her father,” a spokesman for the Trump transition team, Brian Hughes, said in a statement to the New York Times after Nesheiwat declined to respond to the comment. “He became a doctor for saving lives, and his dedication to the lives of his fellow Americans is why President Trump nominated Dr. Nesheiwat to be our next surgeon general.
“She and her house need a father, and hope is their pride.”