A former medical colleague of Ben Carson says the embattled Republican presidential candidate told him the story of his attempted stabbing of someone close to him as a teenager while they were working together in 1987.
WBAL radio in Baltimore posted an audio clip of an interview with Dr. Robert Prince, identifying him as "an anesthesiologist and pain management specialist [who] was a medical resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1987, when he worked with Carson, who was then a pediatric neurosurgeon."
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Prince said the two were working together late one night and were discussing "what led us to become physicians" when Carson shared the story with him:
"We just had a personal conversation at about three in the morning waiting for a patient to come down and, he told me that story, and in fact, I had never heard the story after that because I didn't read the book, I didn't watch the movie, and in fact, just now, when you played that little tape of him telling the story, that's the first time I've actually heard it aside from him almost 30 years ago, and I saw it on CNN that they were questioning the veracity of that story.
"And I thought, 'well wait a minute, you know, why would he tell lowly me, before he could possibly have known that he would be a famous neurosurgeon if it wasn't true.'"
Prince said he couldn't recall whether Carson had told him it was a relative or close friend that he had attempted to stab, adding:
"What I remember is the knife hitting the belt buckle. And that it was a life-changing, sort of religious, experience for him, where he could have gone one way or the other, and he chose the good way.
"And it was a self-deprecating story, it wasn't a story to aggrandize him, people like hearing rags to riches story, but I don't think they like hearing criminal to riches stories. This isn’t a story that you tell if you running for president, for example. This is just a very important moment in his life, and I recognized that."
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