Doctor linked to multiple deaths after severing a baby’s penis in botched circumcision

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A former doctor in Florida has been linked to numerous mishandled medical procedures, including an infant’s botched circumcision and six patient deaths.

Berto Lopez, who spent 33 years working as an OB-GYN - a doctor who cares for pregnant women and women’s reproductive organs - in Palm Beach County, was found liable for $100 million dollars last week after he lost a medical malpractice suit stemming from the botched circumcision.

In 2021, Lopez severed an infant's penis, and did so 10 days after the Florida Board of Medicine voted to revoke his medical license, according to USA TODAY.

The child's family and expert witnesses showed jurors graphic and disturbing images of the aftermath of the circumcision. The family's attorney, Gary Cohen, used the phrase "bleeding, scabby mess" to describe what jurors were seeing.

Lopez has been involved in at least 14 serious injuries sustained by women and children in his care, according to The Palm Beach Post, which reviewed court records and other documentation from his time as a physician.

In six cases, people died.

According to the outlet, Lopez has been named in the four disciplinary cases and nine malpractice suits, including two involving the death of infants, an injury to a third infant and an 18-year-old mom who died during the 1990s.

A typical OB-GYN, on average, faces two to three lawsuits across their career, according to the paper.

Lopez’s license was ultimately revoked after the death of Onystei Castillo-Lopez, a 40-year-old woman who was having her second child while in his care.

Castillo-Lopez suffered tears in her cervix while she was giving birth. She ultimately bled out and died.

Lopez reportedly tried to repair the woman's cervix inside of a hospital suite rather than in an operating room, according to the Florida Department of Health. She died a few months later after Lopez performed the wrong procedure to address her cervical bleeding, according to an administrative complaint.

The state's Board of Medicine had, at that point, already restricted Lopez's license following several other deaths and injuries tied to him months earlier. According to the records reviewed by the Palm Beach Post, Lopez did not inform the mother and her husband that his license had been restricted. He has yet to pay the settlement amount he owes Castillo-Lopez’s husband.

The doctor also did not inform the parents of the baby who was injured in the botched circumcision, according to the family's lawyer.

"If he did, they would have run out that door so fast it would have broken," Cohen said during the trial.

After Lopez cut off a third of the baby's penis, he insisted to his father that the bleeding was normal and spent 45 minutes trying to stop the blood. The next day, the parents took the baby to an emergency room, where they were immediately sent to a pediatric urologist.

The urologist was "visibly shocked" after seeing what had happened to the child, according to the father.

The boy is now three years old, and his parents say he is traumatized by the experience.

"It's never going to heal and no matter what you do, even if you had the money to try to look into something, there’s no restorative surgery that can fix it," the boy's father, Michael Lubben, told WPBF. "He’s not old enough now to realize he’s different, but in just a couple of years, he will be."