PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — An Army veteran who does not want to be identified has exposed what police say was an illegal hair transplant surgery center in Virginia Beach.
Tuesday, a grand jury indicted Dr. Kent Reifschneider and his wife Danielle on a total of three counts of conspiracy and performing an invasive procedure without a license. Their practice, Virginia Surgery Hair Center, was in the headlines this summer when Danielle’s mother, Linda Carnazza, was arrested for allegedly performing hair transplants without a license.
The Army veteran who contacted 10 On Your Side said he was their patient in February.
“He (Dr. Reifschneider) talks with the two women briefly, and then off he went,” the man said. “These two individuals removed all of the grafts from the back of my head and then made roughly 2,200 incisions on my face, or head, and crown and then reinserted the hair into those locations,” said the veteran in a telephone interview. He also told 10 On Your Side he paid $6,500 for procedures to transplant hair from the rear of his head to the top of his head and beard.
“Over the course of the next six weeks,” the man said, “I found that the bumps that I was seeing was actually cobblestones, which is a surgical error, but the major red flag of all medical evidence was that it was unfixable.”
The fix could come in the courtroom and not the operating room.
The veteran has filed a $17 million civil lawsuit that lists a total of five people associated with the practice as defendants.
Regina Mobley: How traumatic has this been for you over the past few months?
Veteran: Every picture that I’m going to take for the rest of my life is going to reflect this catastrophic mistake.
Dr. Kent Reifschneider is an endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters. The hospital told 10 On Your Side he has been placed on administrative leave and that the investigations are unrelated to patients at CHKD.
10 On Your Side reached out to Virginia Surgical Hair Center. An unidentified woman answered the phone and said she had to catch a plane, but that she will call back. 10 On Your Side has also reached out to two local defense attorneys whose names have been associated with the case.