This Dentist's Abuse of Child Patients Will Give You Chills

A child's fear of the dentist chair isn't anything new, but for the patients of 78-year-old Howard Schneider, a dentist practicing in Florida, the screams aren't part of a normal rite of passage. They're horrifying.

Brandi Motley's daughter, 6-year-old Bri'el, for instance, went to have one tooth pulled by Schneider back in December. Brandi wasn't allowed to sit with her daughter (nurses said "kids act better when the parents aren't in the room"), and after three hours in the waiting room, she began to worry.

"Finally, the nurse came and got me and she said there had been an incident," Brandi told CNN. "Bri'el was hyperventilating. She had marks all over her, blood all over her."

When no one could explain what had gone wrong, she took her daughter to the emergency room. There, they removed the gauze from her mouth to reveal that not one tooth was pulled, but all of them — seven teeth in total. Not only that, but Bri'el said Schneider hit and choked her.

Shockingly, the police didn't file a report on the incident, and no attorney would take her case. So she did what many angry parents do and took to Facebook. Her post went viral, and soon, more families began posting photos (and a disturbing secret cell phone video) of their children's unwanted procedures at the chair of Dr. Schneider — including Amanda Barry, who is deaf and couldn't hear the screams of her son in the other room.

In addition to those staging protests outside Schneider's office, dozens of former patients have joined a class action suit against him, attorney Gust Sarris said, for "performing procedures that children don't need, pulling teeth that he knows should still be in the child's mouth, and in some cases, we even have where many procedures were done, except what they came in for."

But perhaps what's most upsetting is that despite malpractice settlements and fraud investigations, Schneider is still free to practice. According to the Florida Board of Dentistry, he's not been disciplined by the state, and his license is clear.

For Amanda, that's unacceptable: "[He needs] to go to jail, to never work on any other kids, to shut his doors so he can never do this again."