Florida Teen Allegedly Caught Impersonating Physician's Assistant Blames Hospital

Aug. 9, 2012 — -- A Florida teenager who administered CPR to a patient while allegedly pretending to be a physician's assistant has blamed the hospital, telling police he was mistakenly given an incorrect ID badge.

Matthew Scheidt, 18, was employed last year as a clerk at a doctor's office across the street from Osceola Regional Medical Center in Kissimmee, Fla. Then 17, he told police that when he went into the medical center to get his identification, he was given incorrect credentials, according to a three-hour, police-interrogation video just obtained by ABC News affiliate WFTV.

He blamed the hospital for his alleged actions.

"Their error was putting me in apparently as a physician's assistant into their computer," Scheidt said in the video. "Let's even say that I said I was a physician assistant. ... Are you that stupid that you are just going to put me in the system as that, without any credentials or any paperwork or nothing?"

He was arrested Sept. 2.

During the interrogation, Scheidt says at one point after the real doctor left the room, he administered a resuscitation procedure on a patient who had overdosed. He told interrogators that the doctor had asked him to perform the procedure.

"He said, 'Can you take over CPR?'" Scheidt said. "I started doing CPR for a minute, two minutes, while he went to get medications and came back in. That was it.

"I swear to God I did not do nothing. I would not have done. I felt so uncomfortable even doing that. And, you know, the only reason why I did do it was because there was nobody else in there. And I'm not going to let her die," he said.

The teen's alleged actions have prompted family members to shake their heads.

"He isn't right upstairs," his grandfather Thomas Scheidt Sr. told "Good Morning America" in September. "He needs some psychiatric help."

This was not the only time the teen has been accused of faking a position. Four months later, Scheidt was arrested while allegedly driving through Miami Beach in what looked like a police cruiser.

"They pulled him out of the vehicle, and they again asked him, 'Are you a police officer?' To which he said 'No,'" Det. Juan Sanchez of the Miami Beach Police Department said.

Scheidt had even gone as far as allegedly stopping other drivers to tell them to put their seatbelts on, until undercover cops arrested him.

After hours of questioning over the hospital incident, Scheidt eventually became remorseful.

"I messed up," he said. "I should have addressed it then when [the identification] was given to me."

Scheidt told investigators he feigned both professions because he wanted to learn about medicine, and had always wanted to be a cop. His attorney is working hard to keep jurors from seeing the interrogation video in Scheidt's upcoming trial.

The teen could face more than 25 years in prison.