Little Rock gastroenterologist has 30-year history of complaints against him, records show

A Little Rock physician faces a hearing Thursday before the Arkansas State Medical Board over allegations of sexually abusing a former employee and improperly prescribing opioids to patients.

Dr. Alonzo Williams, a gastroenterologist licensed in Arkansas since 1979, has been accused of a range of misdeeds over the past three decades, from shoddy medical care to sexual misconduct to wrongful death. The medical board has received about two dozen complaints against him since 1993, according to records obtained via the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Some complainants have filed medical malpractice lawsuits against him, according to court records.

The complaints to the board haven’t resulted in disciplinary action so far, and the lawsuits against Williams have repeatedly been dismissed.

The board will hear testimony Thursday from the former employee accusing him of sexual abuse. She is also suing him in federal court, according to records obtained by the Arkansas Advocate.

The number of complaints should have merited further scrutiny from the medical board before now, said Lamar Porter, a Little Rock attorney who has represented plaintiffs in court against Williams.

“If he’s got as many complaints as [these], why in the world did they not start looking at him more carefully?” Porter said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh this is his only complaint, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.’”

Williams’ consistent evasion of consequences for his alleged actions has given him the nickname “Dr. Teflon” in the legal community, Porter said.

“Dr. Williams always seems to get away with everything around here, but hopefully it ends with how he has and continues to treat patients,” according to a July 28, 2023 email in board records.

A few medical board members suggested suspending Williams’ license at their May meeting, citing the sexual misconduct allegations against him, but no one made a motion to do so.

Arkansas law allows the State Medical Board to issue an emergency suspension of a physician’s license “if the Board receives information indicating that the public health, safety, or welfare requires emergency action.” The board suspended the license of another physician accused of sexual misconduct at the May meeting.

The board enlisted another gastroenterologist to review Williams’ medical records in response to last year’s complaints about the physician’s prescription of opioids.

“It is my opinion that Dr. Williams violated the standard of care of the Arkansas Medical Practice Act in providing grossly negligent care by failing to exercise the standard of care in diagnosis, monitoring and treatment that is basically and routinely taught to students in medical school,” Dr. Eduardo “Tony” deMondesert of Fort Smith wrote to the board on Jan. 16.

Williams exposed patients to “potentially harmful side effects including opioid addiction disorder” by providing “both inappropriate and unnecessary treatments for certain medical conditions,” deMondesert wrote.

“It is curious at least if not overly suspect that ALL of the patients presented with nearly identical symptoms” of abdominal pain at a level that did not justify prescribing opioids, deMondesert added.

An April 2023 complaint to the Arkansas State Board of Nursing claims Suzette Siegler, Williams’ nurse manager, had been writing prescriptions for herself and her family, though the anonymous complainant provided no supporting documentation.

Williams also has been under investigation for Medicaid fraud by the state inspector general since March. The Office of Medicaid Inspector General is investigating allegations that Williams “performed certain procedures that were not medically necessary, failed to adequately assess certain beneficiaries before invasive procedures, and billed for services not rendered,” according to the office’s letter to Williams’ clinic. All payments have been suspended for Medicaid services provided by him and his clinic.

‘Questionable prescriptions’

The medical board received five complaints in July and August 2023 saying that Williams issued “questionable prescriptions” to several patients at his clinics, the Arkansas Diagnostic Center and the Gastroenterology and Surgery Center of Arkansas. Both operate out of the same office on Kanis Road, and the latter is also known as the Kanis Endoscopy Center, according to business records with the Arkansas secretary of state.

“He is creating addicts and fueling the opioid epidemic,” a complainant wrote Feb. 8. “The way Dr. Williams operates is, if you come in and get a EGD [esophagogastroduodenoscopy] or Colonoscopy then he will write pain pills. This is known on the streets. Some patients have procedures monthly.”

In this and several other emails to the medical board this year, complainants also said they could corroborate Williams’ sexual abuse of the former employee who is suing him.

The former medical assistant alleges in her complaint that Williams coerced her into an unwanted sexual relationship with him for three years in exchange for extra pay. She also accuses him of medical negligence, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by the Advocate.

Another former employee, Jordana Gardner, alleges as the sole named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that she was paid less than other medical assistants because she was not “forced to have a quid pro quo sexual relationship with Dr. Williams” as her fellow assistants were. Nurse manager Siegler is one of Williams’ co-defendants.

Gardner’s case was transferred to federal court in July, and her attorneys have asked the court to transfer it back to Pulaski County Circuit Court, where it was initially filed in April.

Some patients have died under Williams’ care. In April 2014, two men both stopped breathing immediately after a colonoscopy at Arkansas Diagnostic Center. A few months later, Faye Watkins also stopped breathing after the same procedure and suffered a brain injury but survived, Arkansas Public Media and USA Today both reported in 2018.

Porter represented Watkins and the families of the two men, Charles Creggett and Ronald Smith, in medical malpractice lawsuits that ultimately settled for undisclosed amounts of money.

Also in 2018, Faye Lucas sought treatment from Williams for abdominal pain. She died later that year of septic shock, and her son, Anthony Robinson, claimed in a 2020 lawsuit that Williams was responsible for Lucas’ death because he “showed negligence by not following up” after a scan revealed a blocked colon was the source of her pain.

Robinson also complained about Williams to the medical board. Williams told the board Lucas had “a non-emergency illness” and did not show up at a scheduled follow-up appointment.

“My question is why is the Board continuing to let this Dr. [sic] kill people and simply brushing it under the rug,” Robinson wrote. “Is it because all the patient’s [sic] are black and poor. What if these were white patients.”

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright dismissed Robinson’s malpractice suit in February 2021 because the statute of limitations had passed, according to court documents.

In Williams’ responses to past and present complaints against him to the medical board, he has denied the allegations and sometimes said the complainant was mistaken, vindictive or unstable.

“This is pure harassment and a vendetta against me,” he told the board in response to the Feb. 8 complaint that accused Williams of sexually abusing his former assistant in addition to improper prescribing of pain medications.

Despite the volume of complaints against Williams, “the medical board has no authority to discipline a physician for ordinary negligence,” Porter said.

“That gets into an issue of whether negligence is gross or punitive in nature, willful or wanton, and seldom in malpractice cases does the board find that there has been basically gross malpractice,” he said.

Similarly, many of the medical board’s responses to people who’ve complained about Williams contained a version of the following: “The board only has the authority to take action against a physician’s license if the medical care rendered by the physician rises to the level of gross negligence or ignorant malpractice as defined: ‘It is carelessness or recklessness to a degree that shows utter indifference to the consequences that may result.’”

Williams declined, through a receptionist at his office, to comment on the medical board hearing or the allegations against him.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the source of information about a lawsuit involving allegations of sexual abuse.