Needing a pair of scissors, a 13-year-old girl went into the bedroom where her father was sleeping and reached for a fishing tackle box on a shelf above the bed. But in the darkened room, she accidentally knocked it over.
“Something fell out of it and there was a loud noise,” she recounted to the police. “I saw blood on my father’s ear.” On the floor was a .380 caliber handgun that had fallen with the tackle box and discharged. The girl’s father had been shot through the head. The local newspaper said the police believed it was a “freak accident.”
That terrible family trauma, which unfolded in the small Florida town of Umatilla in February 1990, set the girl on a new trajectory. It was because of this event, she has said, that she grew up to become a doctor. Saving lives, she thought, would help her cope with the pain and sense of helplessness she felt from her father’s death. Now she is poised to become the next surgeon general.
When President-elect Donald J. Trump announced he would nominate Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to be “the nation’s doctor,” as the office is sometimes called, he was making an unorthodox pick. Traditionally, the surgeon general has been selected from an impressive pool of public health officials, policy experts, renowned physicians or accomplished plague fighters.
Dr. Nesheiwat spent her career far removed from major research institutions, hospitals or medical schools. Instead, she was a working urgent-care doctor who has spent much of her professional life at CityMD, a for-profit chain of clinics that have sprung up across New York City over the last 15 years. And near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Nesheiwat began regularly appearing on Fox News as a medical contributor.
As she has emerged as a public figure, Dr. Nesheiwat has periodically referenced her father’s death — and the strength her mother displayed raising her and four siblings. To her 80,000 followers on X, she reflected on how her mother would take them to the ocean to cheer them up after “dad passed away in an accident.”
His death is mentioned in the very first sentence of her memoir, “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which will be released this month: “When I was 13 years old, I helplessly watched my dear father dying from an accident as blood was spurting everywhere,” she writes. “I couldn’t save his life.”
From this moment, she writes, she yearned to help others. “This was the start of my personal journey in life to become a physician and enter the world of healing arts,” she writes.
Nowhere in the next 260 pages does she elaborate on how her father died, and she does not mention that he was shot.
But The Orlando Sentinel, published not far from the small city where the Nesheiwat family lived, provided further details. A small news item published on Feb. 25, 1990, describes how a 13-year-old girl upended a tackle box, causing a gun to fall out and discharge. A single bullet hit the girl’s father, Ben Nesheiwat in the head; he was declared dead the following day in an Orlando hospital.
A police report obtained by The New York Times contains the account that 13-year-old Janette gave an officer who responded to a 911 call. “I was in Father’s bedroom at about 7:15 a.m. getting some scissors,” she said, according to the incident report. “I opened the fishing tackle box and the whole thing tipped over.”
Before calling 911, she added, she went to the bathroom to get a towel and then ice, which she put on her father’s head.
When the police arrived, they found the dying man, Ziad “Ben” Nesheiwat, lying on top of the sheets, his head surrounded by pillows, and his arms crossed over his chest, right over left. One police officer who responded to the scene described the case in his report as an “accidental shooting.”
Messages seeking comment were left with Dr. Nesheiwat, who did not immediately respond. When reached by phone, her brother, Daniel Nesheiwat, declined to comment.
The current surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, has treated firearm deaths as an urgent public health crisis, issuing an advisory on “firearm violence” in July. Each year some 500 Americans die in unintentional shootings, which make up about 1 percent of the total firearm deaths in the country.
It remains to be seen whether Dr. Nesheiwat will address gun safety as surgeon general, should she be confirmed by the Senate — or if she will discuss her childhood tragedy to illustrate the point. The surgeon general may have limited control over health policy but is responsible for communicating key health information to the public. Those who have held the post in the past have chosen a variety of issues to focus on, from smoking to loneliness.
Dr. Nesheiwat describes the death of her father, a 44-year-old chemist who worked for the county, as a devastating blow. “The trauma of that moment clung to me like a relentless shadow, unraveling the fabric of my young life and leaving me in a perpetual state of devastation,” she writes in her book.
She and her four siblings are second-generation Americans who were raised in Umatilla, a community of just 2,500 people, by parents who immigrated from Jordan. The highly unusual circumstances of their father’s death sent shock waves through the small community and could have easily shattered the family.
But the Nesheiwats appear to have recovered to a remarkable degree. They grew up to be lawyers and to work at senior levels of government. One also married a multiplatinum rock star.
Dr. Nesheiwat attributes their remarkable success to the iron will and encouragement of their mother, Hayat Nesheiwat, a pediatric nurse, who took on extra shifts at the hospital after her husband’s death to make ends meet. Janette, who was the second oldest, started working at a fast-food restaurant when she was 16 to help out.
Whenever their mother was not working a night shift, the children would gather in her bed and talk about their days and share their hopes and dreams for tomorrow, Janette’s older sister, Julia, later recounted in a speech. The family would read Scripture at bedtime.
“As a family — my mother in the lead — worked to make the calamity of my father’s death a tragic lesson by which to learn and grow, to turn a negative into a positive,” Dr. Nesheiwat wrote. “As a family, we set our minds to that and it worked. We became strong.”
Julia Nesheiwat went on to serve as homeland security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term as president. Before that, she had been an Army intelligence officer and later served as a deputy special presidential envoy who worked on securing the release of hostages held worldwide. She is married to Michael Waltz, a Florida congressman whom Mr. Trump recently picked to be his national security adviser.
A younger Nesheiwat sister, Jaclyn, was a fashion model who married Scott Stapp, the frontman of the rock band Creed, the post-grunge group with a string of hit songs in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Two other siblings, Daniel and Dina, are lawyers.
Dr. Nesheiwat, 48, attended the University of South Florida and went to medical school at the American University of the Caribbean on the island of St. Maarten. She did her residency in family medicine in Arkansas, working for a time at a tiny rural hospital in Eureka Springs, a town of Victorian houses nestled in a steep valley in the Ozarks. She treated motorcyclists with traumatic injuries, sometimes stabilizing them before a helicopter flew them to a larger hospital.
In Arkansas, she became a local TV personality as the host of a show called “Family Health Today.” She would appear on air still dressed in her scrubs, she recounts in her book. She also began going on medical missions, traveling to Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and then to Joplin, Mo., after the devastating 2011 tornado.
By 2012, she had moved to New York and taken a job at a CityMD urgent care clinic in Times Square. “It was nonstop trauma and drama,” she writes.
CityMD had been founded by a small group of doctors just two years earlier. But over the next decade it would have a dramatic impact on how medical care is delivered in New York City. Its brightly lit storefront clinics were open late, 365 days a year, and walk-ins were encouraged. Many New Yorkers found the clinics welcoming and convenient when they needed to get coughs checked out, antibiotics prescribed and cuts and sprains treated.
Some doctors and health-care experts have raised concerns about urgent care clinics, noting that they could undermine the role of primary care doctors and efforts to focus on wellness and prevention.
But such clinics are here to stay. When Dr. Nesheiwat joined CityMD, the company had no more than a dozen locations in the city. Today it has more than 150 clinics in the region and logs about five million visits a year, according to Walgreens, which owns a controlling interest in the company.
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, many New Yorkers came to rely on CityMD for Covid tests, and lines sometimes stretched down the block when infections surged.
Dr. Nesheiwat rose through the ranks at CityMD to become one of its five medical directors in New York City. But she is very much a working urgent-care doctor, and until Mr. Trump selected her, she was still seeing patients.
She claims to have cared for more than 20,000 Covid-19-related patients. At the height of the deadly first wave of the virus in New York, in spring of 2020, she writes, she once saw 94 patients in a single, grueling shift at the Times Square clinic. By the end of it, her feet were numb.
Until the pandemic, she was one more doctor in a city full of them. But she built a public profile through her appearances on Fox News, starting in 2020, where she has weighed in, for example, on studies about cancer and Brett Favre’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. “Almost every day, I have a patient who recognizes me from Fox,” she said earlier this year. She also sells vitamins on her personal website.
She initially championed the Covid vaccines, calling them “a gift from God” in a Fox News opinion piece in February 2021. She urged everyone to wear a mask. “Even consider wearing two masks at the same time,” she wrote.
But by late 2022, she had started voicing opposition to including Covid vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule, as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee had just recommended.
“What will that do, help reduce a sniffle?” she said during an appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox. “We need to stop with the fear-mongering. We’re no longer in a Covid emergency.”
At some point, she made it onto Mr. Trump’s radar.
“Dr. Janette, I’m a big fan of yours,” Mr. Trump said in a video message to Dr. Nesheiwat around the time of her birthday last year. “You do a fantastic job letting us know what’s happening with health.” In the video, Mr. Trump is seated next to Dr. Nesheiwat’s older sister, Julia, his former homeland security adviser.
When Mr. Trump announced that he would pick her as surgeon general, on Nov. 22, he praised her as a “fierce advocate and strong communicator for preventive medicine and public health.” His statement also mentioned that she was “one of five children raised by a widowed immigrant mother.”
The police reports indicate that the officers on the scene interviewed Janette, who was crying outside on the porch when they arrived, and two of her siblings.
One of her sisters, Jaclyn, then 9, also gave the police a written statement, explaining that when she walked into her father’s room, after the gunshot, she found a gun on the floor. She placed it on the night stand, where police officers found it.
“We tried to wake him up but he couldn’t,” Jaclyn sister wrote.
One of the officers who responded that February day, Dale Swanton, long since retired and now 91, instantly remembered the case when reached by phone this week, despite nearly 35 years having passed. “The gun fell down and shot him — that’s what they said,” he recalled.
His wife, Christy Swanton, happened to be the dispatcher who took the 911 call that morning, which was placed by Janette and her brother, Daniel. Ms. Swanton recalled that her husband and others had been trying to make sense of the mechanics of the shooting.
And she remembered something else about the family, and the 13-year-old girl at the center of the tragedy.
“The young girl was very, very bright,” Mrs. Swanton said, “and as I understand it, had a remarkable future ahead of her.”
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