MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — It was an attack Dr. Steven Silvers mostly doesn’t remember.
And now he’ll never forget.
“He attacked me from behind, and the next thing I remember was being in the emergency room as I was rendered unconscious,” he said.
Silvers is speaking publicly for the first time outside the courtroom about the incident that made national headlines, and to which his attacker recently pled guilty.
In October of 2024, the longtime OB/GYN was on his way to his office at Mt. Sinai Medical Center on Miami Beach when he was confronted by a 19-year-old near the elevators, later identified as Ventura Perez Del Castillo.
“He approached me and said, ‘Are you Dr. Silvers?’ I said yes,’” Silvers recalled. “He said, ‘You didn’t give my mother enough pain medicine.’”
Silvers remembered wondering if she was a patient he had just seen, or someone whose prescription needed to be filled.
“Hence I kept saying: ‘Who’s your mother? Who’s your mother?’ He wouldn’t answer. And I followed him to the elevator and kept engaging because I wanted to know who the mother was,” Silvers said. “If someone was in pain, I want to know.”
According to the police report, Del Castillo told police he was upset about medication his mother was given and claimed Silvers was “committing malpractice.”
“Next thing I remember was just waking up in the emergency room. I was in a lot of pain, had multiple rib fractures, had multiple facial fractures, my clavicle was in multiple directions, brain bleeds,” Silvers said.
The 69-year-old doctor appeared in Del Castillo’s first court appearance from his hospital bed with a black eye and a shaky voice. A Judge ordered Del Castillo to stay in jail.
Del Castillo’s mother testified in a later hearing that she was given opioids she did not want for an in-patient procedure in June, four months prior to the attack. While she said she never coerced her son to attack the doctor, at some point she did express her displeasure to her son.
But Silvers contends it’s impossible to administer narcotics against someone’s will or without consent.
“The patient has to have a tourniquet. The patient has to open and close. All the patient has to do is say I don’t want it,” he said. “The whole story didn’t make sense, because if I was so mean or rude to her, why come to my office twice, months later?”
Silvers has been licensed to practice medicine for four decades and has been delivering babies at Mt. Sinai since 1989.
State records show he is a doctor in good standing with no disciplinary history.
In August, Del Castillo pled guilty to felony battery, admitting his actions and telling the court he was sorry.
“I hope he is,” Silvers said. “You have to have to be careful what you say to your children. No matter how old they are.”
Silvers said he still deals with pain. But he’s back to seeing his patients.
“I’ve always been the rock, I’ve always been the giver,” he said. “My family, my rabbi - they all said to me: you have to accept people helping you. It’s not very easy. As hard as it was to view that video that everybody around the world saw, at least I was alive to see it.”
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