Brenda Phillips hangs onto a Houston summer memory, circa 1996. It’s Friday night, she’s 26 years old and even though she’s sitting in gridlock traffic, she’s happy. When people in the cars around her begin opening doors and playing music, she joins in.
She’s single, has two wonderful daughters, and big ambitions: A graduate of Houston Community College, she’d already been working with domestic violence survivors and pregnant and parenting teens, and planned to apply to the Houston Police Academy to be a cop like her father.
Then that summer, while doing school custodial work for extra cash, Phillips hurt herself lifting a table. She reported the injury, received workers’ compensation coverage and was referred to an osteopath. But when she arrived for a follow-up appointment, she found a note on the door directing her elsewhere.
Confused, Phillips found the other suite—packed with what seemed like a hundred other patients. Eventually, a gorgeous man entered the room. Who is that? she remembers thinking.
She soon learned his name: Dr. Eric Heston Scheffey.
He ordered an MRI and a CT scan, and told her she had a herniated disc and was a candidate for a spinal fusion and a lumbar laminectomy—a surgery in which vertebral bone is removed to ease pressure on the spinal cord or nerve roots. Scheffey submitted a recommendation for surgery to her insurance provider and said he’d get her the treatment she needed.
Phillips trusted him, but had no idea who he really was.
For two decades, medical malpractice lawsuits and official complaints piled up against Scheffey. His medical license was suspended in 1986 and again in 1995, but both times the suspensions were reduced to probation. It wasn’t until 2005 that Texas finally revoked his license. When he was prosecuted for crimes related to patients, charges were abruptly dropped after a prosecutor said the state could not meet its burden of proof.
His story didn’t end there: He’s currently in litigation with the Securities and Exchange Commission for his part in an alleged $45 million stock fraud scheme. According to the complaint, he splits his time between homes in Denver and in Switzerland and, public records show, maintains a penthouse apartment in Houston, too.
Scheffey’s record, and the state’s failure to stop him years before, are shocking. Even more so, perhaps, are assertions by those who deal with the state’s medical regulatory system that there are likely more Scheffeys out there today.
“Looking at Dr. Scheffey, one isn’t likely to think he’s a monster,” said retired personal injury attorney Priscilla Walters, who spent years investigating Scheffey and his serial malpractice. “But he was a monster.”
surgeon in Texas from 1982 to 2005. He was also killing and maiming people
