Victor Alcorn
TOOTHY GRIN: Robert Garelick, a Long Island dentist, sports a goofy grin on his face as he is led away by cops in Suffolk County yesterday.
It wasn’t the drill that was buzzing — it was the dentist.
Long Island cavity filler Robert Garelick, 57, flashed his own pearly whites yesterday on his way to face charges that he operated on unsuspecting patients while completely hammered.
Garelick had bloodshot eyes at his Lindenhurst office Monday when he injected novocaine on the wrong side of a patient’s mouth — while swilling vodka from a sports bottle — then used a high-powered drill to file down another man’s chipped tooth, court records show.
His assistant, who said he’s been boozing on the job for months, decided she’d finally seen enough and pulled the plug on her boss, records show.
“I texted [a co-worker] . . . and told her he had the bottle in his hand and we had to do something,’’ assistant Kimberly Curtis told authorities.
Just after his bust, Garelick told cops he had a few beers with his pizza for lunch.
He then changed his story — not that it helped.
“I never had any beers with my pizza. I’ve been sipping at that bottle all along today,’’ the married dad of two from Melville told police. “I did something incredibly stupid.”
At 11 a.m., “I observed Dr. Garelick give [a] patient novocaine, an anesthetic for pain relief, in the wrong place in the patient’s mouth. [Then], I observed Dr. Garelick looking for the cavities on the right side of the patient's mouth, but the cavities were on the left side,” Curtis, 41, told officials.
“I pointed this out to the doctor, and that’s when he requested more novocaine for the patient. So now, he basically numbed the whole patient’s mouth.”
Then before 4:30 p.m., Curtis said, she went into Garelick’s office, and, “I noticed that he was drinking from a white and purple squeeze bottle.’’
“I smelled a strong odor of alcohol,” she said, and when he left the room, “I opened [the bottle] up. I smelled vodka in it. It was at that time that I had to do something. I was concerned for [his next] patient.”
Garelick “was treating him with a drill. He was filing the tooth down. When you’re using that drill, you have to be very careful and have a steady hand.”
She texted dental hygienist Dina Fara, who alerted cops.
Garelick was busted at the office and charged in Suffolk County Court with reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor. He plead not guilty and was released on his own recognizance.
None of Garelick’s Monday patients was injured.
Filling no pain: Dentist all smiles in drunk-drill bust
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Filling no pain: Dentist all smiles in drunk-drill bust
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Filling no pain: Dentist all smiles in drunk-drill bust
