14 DAY TRIAL // Just days ago, police officers in the city of West Palm Beach in Florida, US, were called in and asked to arrest a teenage boy who was posing as a doctor at a local hospital. The thing is that, before finally being taken into custody, the teenager got to play doctor for quite a while.
Thus, the officers who handled this case say that, by the time they got around to removing him from the hospital, the 17-year-old had been pretending to be a doctor for about a month. For some reason, nobody noticed that he was only a teenager.
How a teenager pretended to be a doctor for a full month
The reason why nobody at the St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, noticed that the young boy was not a doctor but just a teenager pretending to be one was because, while walking the halls of this hospital, he always wore a white coat.
Mind you, this white coat even had the word “anesthesiology” embroidered on its front, where everyone could see it. Add to this the fact that the teenager made sure to carry a stethoscope with him at all times, and it should not come as a surprise that people failed to see him for who he really was.
A real doctor saw through the carefully constructed ruse
It is understood that the man who alerted local authorities in West Palm Beach and told them that they needed to arrest a teenager posing as a doctor at the St. Mary's Medical Center was an actual physician by the name Sebastian Kent.
Apparently, Dr. Sebastian Kent became suspicious of the boy when, while the two and a patient were all together in an examination room in the OB-GYN office, the would-be doctor started acting strangely. The physician called the cops and the young doctor was revealed to be merely a teenage boy.
The teenager will not be held accountable for his actions
Having identified the teenager, police officers contacted his mother, who told them that the 17-year-old was suffering from a mental illness and was refusing to take his medication. Hence, the cops agreed not to file any legal charges against him.
In a statement, the St. Mary's Medical Center's managing board insists that, even if the boy posed as a doctor at this facility for a month, he never had any contact with the patients admitted here. Except for that one time when he, Dr. Sebastian Kent and a woman were all in an examination room together, that is.
“The individual never had contact with any hospital patients and did not gain access to any patient care areas of the hospital at any time. The hospital immediately notified local authorities, who took the individual into custody, and we are cooperating with their ongoing investigation,” the statement reads.