An Impostor’s Doctored Identity Uncovered by State Investigator

For five years, prosecutors say, he worked as a physician’s assistant without a license.

He was charged with three armed robberies in another state but eluded detection because of a glitch in the system. He was even able to work as a doctor for one week last fall in Huntington Beach before it all finally caught up with him.

He called himself Mark Farel Shannon, and he is facing misdemeanor charges of practicing medicine without a license, representing himself as a physician without a license, forging a prescription and representing himself as a physician’s assistant.

An investigator from the state Board of Medical Quality Assurance began checking into his background after he was arrested in December as a result of a tip that he was posing as a doctor and treating patients. The answers to the questions she asked led to a disturbing conclusion.

Yes, a Mark Shannon had grown up in Chicago Heights, Ill. Yes, a Mark Shannon had attended Northern Illinois University on a gymnastics scholarship. And yes, a Mark Shannon had passed a paramedic training program at a suburban Chicago hospital.

Then, as investigator Kathy Schmidt began to hang up the telephone, the Illinois hospital official on the other line posed a curious question: “Why do you want to know? Mark Shannon’s been dead since December of 1977.”

The real Mark Farel Shannon committed suicide on Dec. 6. of that year, according to his family and Illinois police. For at least five years, Schmidt contends, Shannon’s best friend, Steven Joseph Martin, 30, has been using his name, fooling medical clinics where he worked and leaving behind a path of embarrassed friends.

Martin, himself a licensed paramedic in Illinois, played the role of doctor exceedingly well, state investigators said. He is accused in court of treating patients while impersonating a doctor for only one week. But around his apartment complex and at the various nightclubs he frequented, Schmidt said, Martin was known as “Dr. Shannon,” an orthopedic surgeon.

Martin, whose identity has been confirmed through fingerprints, declined numerous requests for comment, directing inquiries to his lawyer, Richard Karch, who would say nothing.

But in a letter investigators found at his apartment, a woman friend from Reno congratulated Martin on becoming a doctor and setting up a new practice. At the time of his arrest, he had enlisted an investor to help him start a clinic specializing in treatment of athletic injuries, Schmidt said.

To bolster his credibility as Shannon, Schmidt said, Martin had a copy of Shannon’s birth certificate and used the dead man’s Social Security number.

He impersonated Mark Shannon so well that even now some people refuse to believe they have been misled. Martin’s girlfriend, who declined to give her full name, said she remains convinced that Martin is Mark Shannon, despite the fingerprint evidence.

She said state investigators are “out to get” her boyfriend.

At the East Edinger Medical Clinic in Santa Ana, where Martin worked for three months last summer, clinic director Dr. Randy Jones said the man he knew as Shannon went so far one day as to introduce an elderly woman as his mother, Mrs. Shannon. Jones said an older man identifying himself as Shannon’s father also telephoned the office.

Jones said he began checking the authenticity of Martin’s medical certificate after he gave inconsistent statements about his background to fellow employees. He discovered that the certificate was fake.

“It looked like someone erased a number (on a certificate) and put it in,” Jones said. “I then called BMQA, and they said they had no record of him.”

Jones said he then fired the man he knew as Shannon.

Martin had been fired from at least two other clinics for failure to produce his original physician’s assistant certificate, Schmidt said, but his name was never reported to medical board authorities.

It was in August that Martin was hired at the Medical Care Center in Huntington Beach, Schmidt said. There, he worked under Shannon’s name as a physician’s assistant until the clinic’s only doctor, Jerry N. Rand, was arrested Nov. 21 on suspicion of having controlled drugs for personal use. Rand, 41, was freed on $10,000 bail.

The Orange County district attorney’s office did not pursue criminal charges against Rand. However, a Superior Court commissioner this week ordered Rand to stop practicing medicine pending a May 5 hearing on whether his alleged drug and alcohol habits pose a danger to patients.

For the next week, Martin posed as a doctor at the clinic, according to the criminal charges against him. Martin was arrested after an undercover investigator from the state Board of Medical Quality Assurance was dispatched to the clinic to check out an anonymous tip that he was illegally practicing medicine.

Schmidt, a seven-year investigator assigned to the state board’s Santa Ana office, said she set about checking his professional resume, which she later found listed the real Mark Shannon’s educational and work background.

After numerous calls to Illinois, Schmidt said, she was informed of Shannon’s death by the director of paramedic training at Silver Cross Hospital in suburban Chicago, where Shannon, a paramedic, had graduated from classes a decade earlier.

‘Who Is This Guy’

The next question for Schmidt was, “Who is this guy” in California?

The answer to that question came quickly. Schmidt recalled viewing a phony medical certificate and seeing the name “Steve Martin” whited out and replaced with Mark Shannon.

She mentioned the name to officials at Silver Cross Hospital, and they told her, “Oh, yeah, that’s the paramedic body builder.” Martin was a weightlifting enthusiast then, they said. They also told her that Martin had been a good friend of Shannon’s.

Schmidt said she soon made a positive identification of Martin through a comparison of fingerprints. Old Illinois acquaintances also identified him from his current pictures in California.

When Martin was first arrested by state investigators in December, he was released on his own recognizance.

But when his true identity was learned, and it was determined that he was also wanted as a fugitive from Illinois, Martin was arrested again. He was freed on $50,000 bail while the state of Illinois tried to arrange extradition.

Charges in Illinois

In Illinois, Martin faces trial on charges of committing two robberies and a six-year prison sentence for another robbery, said Illinois State’s Atty. Bob Clifford. Martin failed to appear for his sentencing after being convicted of robbery in 1983, Clifford said.

Extradition proceedings could take from “weeks to months,” Clifford said. Meanwhile, the California case against Martin is pending in West Orange County Municipal Court.

Because Illinois officials failed to enter Martin’s criminal history into a computerized national crime network, Schmidt said, he eluded detection after coming to California despite two arrests for drunk driving and another for impersonating a doctor. Clifford could not explain why the information was not entered.

Virginia Mulligan, director of the South Cook County Emergency Medical Services program under which both Shannon and Martin worked, said she remembers Martin as the only paramedic to be fired for professional misconduct in the 15-year history of the program. Martin was fired from the program for stealing Valium, a tranquilizer, according to his work records in Illinois.

At The Gymn health club in Chicago Heights, Martin is remembered as an avid body builder who drew the ire of club owner Gary Mekuly for not paying his membership fees. Mekuly said that he eventually kicked Martin out of the club.

“I had nothing but trouble with him,” Mekuly said.

Shannon, a star high school gymnast, is remembered fondly by those who knew him.

“He was a good-looking, nice guy,” said Kevin Tracy, 31, a Chicago Heights fireman who once considered himself Shannon’s best friend.

Shannon met Martin at The Gymn, where Shannon’s stepfather also worked out, and the two became inseparable over the course of their three-year friendship, Tracy said. They worked as paramedics at the same ambulance company.

In the months before he died, Shannon exhibited symptoms of heavy drug use, said his mother, Nancy LoBue. He overslept. He refused to socialize. He would not even go out to dinner with the family. One day, he came home and told his mother that he had been suspended from his job as a paramedic at Daley’s Ambulance because he had been caught taking Valium from a hospital.

He admitted to his parents that he had become addicted to the drug and began a program of withdrawal. Within a week, her son decided to quit cold-turkey, LoBue said, because the hospital had indicated a willingness to reinstate Shannon if he kicked the habit.

In the family’s comfortable ranch-style home in Chicago Heights a short time later, Shannon ran into the bathroom, looking for drugs, and then he raced into his father’s office study, locking the door against his pursuing mother. Through the door, his mother said, Shannon shouted, “ ‘You don’t want to watch me,’ ” and then she heard the boom of a gunshot.

Shannon’s fellow paramedics who responded to the scene found that he had shot himself with a .357 magnum that his stepfather kept in the house.

Sniffling softly over the phone as she told this story, LoBue composed herself and bristled with anger that Martin would use her dead son’s name.

“This has reopened old wounds,” Shannon’s mother said. “It’s so cruel.”