Donald Trump has appointed a woman who accidentally shot dead her father to be the US’s new Surgeon General.
Dr Janette Nesheiwat, 48, is expected to be sworn in within weeks of Mr Trump’s January 20 inauguration to take the position as ‘the nation’s top doctor’.
Glamorous Dr Nesheiwat is famous in the US as a medical expert on Fox News and has often talked about how losing her father at a young age inspired her career in medicine.
But The New York Times last night revealed that when she was 13 she accidentally shot dead her father at the family home in Orlando, Florida.
According to a 1990 police report, she told officers she was trying to find a pair of scissors and reached for a fishing tackle box on a shelf.
She told police: ‘I was in father’s bedroom at around 7.15am getting some scissors. I opened the fishing tackle box and the whole thing tipped over.
‘Something fell out of it and there was a loud noise. I saw blood on my father’s ear.’
Ben Nesheiwat, 44, was declared dead the next day from a bullet wound to the head from a .38-calibre handgun, which was stored inside the tackle box.
A coroner ruled his death an ‘accidental shooting’.
In her memoir, Beyond The Stethoscope, Dr Nesheiwat describes how the loss of her father inspired her to chose medicine as a career, but does not mention her role in his death.
She wrote: ‘When I was 13 years old I helplessly watched my dear father dying from an accident as blood was spurting everywhere. I couldn’t save his life. This was the start of my personal journey in life to become a physician.’
She credited her mother Hayat for raising her to be successful.
Mr Trump’s choice of Dr Nesheiwat is just the latest in a line of colourful choices for high office in his new administration.
He picked Karoline Leavitt, 27, to be the youngest-ever White House press secretary and gay billionaire Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary.
The President-elect’s pick for Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, paid off a woman who alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in 2017, an accusation he denied and for which he was not charged.
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