By J. Michael Sharman, Contributing WriterSycloria Williams’ baby girl, Shanice, died shortly after childbirth.
The physician who was supposed to have attended Ms. Williams at the facility, “A GYN Diagnostic Center” in Hialeah, didn’t show up. No one else at the clinic, including the owner/operator, Belkis Gonzolez, held a medical license of any type , and when Sycloria went into labor and delivered her premature baby, no staff member called 911, a neonatologist, or any medical or rescue personnel.
After Shanice was born, Ms. Gonzolez cut the umbilical cord but did nothing else to assist her for the five minutes she lived, and when she died, Gonzalez put the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw her in the trashcan.
A day later, the police received an anonymous call from a pay phone outside of the clinic stating that a baby had been killed there by employees and the baby’s remains were still on the premises.
The police came but could find nothing. Later, the police got another anonymous tip that the baby’s remains were on the roof of the clinic, but the body wasn’t there when they searched. A final anonymous call was made, and this time police found Shanice’s decomposing corpse in a cardboard box.
Sycloria was 18 years old, single and 23 weeks pregnant. She decided she did not have the maturity or resources to care for her child. She paid a down payment of $800 on a $1,200 abortion fee, and The Miramar Women’s Center referred her to Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique , who met with her and gave her Laminaria (a drug that dilates the cervix) and three other prescription medications to set her body in motion for the relatively late-term abortion.
Dr. Renelique told her he would meet her and complete the abortion the next day at “A GYN Diagnostic Center”, a Hialeah clinic under the same ownership. Renelique didn’t show up, but the drugs he had given her kept working and the unlicensed staff gave her more medications, and Shanice was born on the floor of the clinic.
At that point, as Sycloria’s attorney, Tom Pennecamp, says, “She came face to face with a human being and that changed everything.”
Two weeks after Shanice’s death, the clinic operator, Belkis Gonzalez, was arrested on two felony counts of related to the unlicensed practice of medicine – but not in Shanice’s case. These two counts stemmed from a report that had been made to police two years earlier on November 16, 2004 that “The Miramar Women’s Center” and “A GYN Diagnostic Center” had two unlicensed persons, Robelto Osbourne and Kieron Nisbet, performing abortions.
Osbourne’s medical license had been revoked on August 17, 2004 and Nisbet never had been fully licensed in Florida. Osbourne pled guilty on September 23, 2005 and Nisbet fled to Trinidad with arrest warrants issued against him.
Two other clinic employees, Joselin Collado and Adieran Rojas were both charged as part of that investigation and in 2006 pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license.
The clinic, “A GYN Diagnostic Center”, has now finally surrendered its license and closed.
One of the documents that the Miramar clinic gave to Sycloria was a notice that Dr. Renelique had no current medical malpractice insurance.
Renelique’s address of record is in Woodmere, New York and according to state records there, he has made at least five medical malpractice payments in the past decade.
On February 6, 2009, two and a half years after Shanice’s death, the Florida Board of Medicine unanimously voted to revoke Renelique’s medical license.
The Homicide Division is still investigating but no criminal charges have yet been filed.
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