$704,600 Billed for
Cadavers
Tue Mar 9, 7:55 AM ET
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By Charles Ornstein and Richard Marosi Times Staff Writers
Over six years, a UCLA medical
school official sold 496 cadavers for $704,600, according to invoices that provide the first evidence of the scope
of the scandal in the school\'s body donor program.
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Slideshow: Lawsuit Alleges UCLA Sold Body
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The invoices on UCLA letterhead, covering transactions from 1998 through 2003,
were shown to The Times by the law firm representing Ernest V. Nelson, the entrepreneur who purchased the body parts
and resold them to large research corporations.
Among the companies that bought the body parts from
Nelson was pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, according to correspondence sent by the law firm to the
University of California and reviewed by The Times. Reached after hours, a spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson,
Susan Odenthal, said she was unfamiliar with any such transactions and could not immediately reach company officials
for comment.
The new information came to light as UCLA scrambled to address the crisis enveloping its
willed body program, in which program director Henry G. Reid, 54, is suspected of illegally selling body parts to
Nelson for personal gain. Nelson, 46, who is not a UCLA employee, is suspected of reselling the parts to medical
research companies. It is illegal to sell body parts for profit.
University officials said they had not
seen the invoices reviewed by The Times and suggested they could have been fabricated. But the officials
acknowledged that they had no idea of the volume of the alleged transactions, nor the amount of money involved.
\"We simply, actually, do not have the facts,\" Dr. J. Thomas Rosenthal, associate vice chancellor of
the UCLA School of Medicine, said in an interview.
Both Reid and Nelson were arrested by UCLA police
over the weekend. Reid was accused of grand theft, Nelson of receiving stolen property. Both men have posted bond
and been released from Los Angeles County Jail. Reid and another UCLA employee were placed on leave more than a week
ago.
Reid, whose UCLA salary is $56,760 annually, has declined to talk to reporters, and left a note on
his door Monday asking the media to respect his privacy.
The Los Angeles County district attorney\'s
office is still deciding how the case will be prosecuted, said head Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch. He said he is
looking through the codes and statutes to figure out if there are special sections dealing with the disposal of
bodies. \"We haven\'t finished the research,\" he said. \"I haven\'t seen the facts. The facts will dictate
what law applies.\"
Also Monday, attorneys filed a lawsuit in Superior Court on behalf of relatives of
people who had donated their bodies to UCLA since 1997, when Reid became director. They plan to seek class-action
status.
\"The families we represent are devastated over the gruesome facts that have come to light in
the last few days,\" said lawyer Raymond Boucher.
Boucher also represents donors and families in an
ongoing 1996 class-action lawsuit in which UCLA is accused of commingling ashes from donated corpses with medical
waste, and dumping them in a landfill. As part of the first case, he will ask a Superior Court commissioner today to
shut down the program until the problems can be sorted through.
The new lawsuit is seeking unspecified
damages for families of donors \"whose gifts have been completely and totally violated.\"
Dr. Gerald
S. Levey, vice chancellor of UCLA Medical Sciences and dean of the medical school, apologized to donors and their
families at a news conference Monday afternoon.
\"These alleged crimes violate the trust of the
donors, their families and UCLA,\" he said. \"We are deeply sorry.\"
Levey said UCLA is reevaluating
its oversight of its willed body program. \"We truly thought that we had adequate policies and procedures,\" he
said. \"We are investigating how our policies failed to detect these employees\' illegal activities.\"
Rosenthal said the school decided not to close the program because officials did not want to cut off the flow
of cadavers and body parts for researchers and medical students. But he said the program will be run with direct
oversight of the dean\'s office and former Gov. George Deukmejian, who has agreed to oversee reforms.
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Meanwhile, UCLA police announced that they had seized the records of the willed
body program after obtaining a search warrant. Medical school officials said they will be able to consult the
records as needed, with police oversight.
UCLA police also executed search warrants over the weekend at the
homes of Reid and Nelson. Karl T. Ross, acting chief of the UCLA Police Department, said officers seized three
computers, a firearm, and several boxes of documents, computer discs and compact discs from Reid\'s home. They
took two computers, two firearms and several boxes of documents and discs from Nelson\'s home.
Ross said there
is a \"strong possibility\" that the men will be charged with additional crimes. As the investigation continues,
he would not rule out bringing in the FBI (news - web sites) if detectives suspect that stolen body parts were taken
across state lines.
\"I would say this investigation is going to take a rather long period of time,\" Ross
said.
Nelson\'s Claremont-based lawyer, Greg Hafif, said that the accusations against his client are
\"outrageous,\" and that the invoices show UCLA was aware of his dealings and condoned them. In addition, he said,
Nelson did not violate the law because he did not sell the parts for a profit, but billed only for his labor,
handling and storage costs.
\"It was Reid that assured Mr. Nelson that what he was doing was legal, as long as
it was for medical research,\" Hafif said.
Nelson did not work with any other willed body programs and has gone
out of business, Hafif said.
In addition to the invoices, Hafif showed The Times cashiers\' checks indicating
that Nelson paid Reid a total of $30,000 from May to September 1999. He said Nelson had not given him any other
cashiers\' checks or proof of payments for the other amounts noted on the invoices. The cashiers\' checks from
1999 match the amounts on the invoices from the same period.
Nelson told The Times on Sunday that he had been
allowed to enter UCLA\'s seventh-floor freezer regularly with a saw and cut up about 800 bodies over six years.
Nelson declined to comment further on Monday, but Hafif said UCLA staff members other than Reid helped Nelson
carry bags of bodies out to his van
\"Where was UCLA when my client was in their facility two times a week for
six years cutting up cadavers and hauling them back to his office in broad daylight?\" Hafif asked.
Court
records submitted by UCLA show that Reid met regularly with top medical school officials and faculty to discuss the
policies and operations of the willed body program.
But Marlin, the outside attorney for UCLA, adamantly denied
that anyone other than Reid and one of his associates knew about the scheme.
The documents reviewed at
Hafif\'s office show that Reid sent nearly 70 invoices to Nelson from 1998 to 2003. In them, Reid asked Nelson to
pay for \"preparation fees for unembalmed human cadavers, as per prearranged agreement.\"
The fee for each
cadaver was about $1,400, and Nelson was typically billed for eight at a time, the records showed. The annual
invoice totals ranged from $42,600 for 30 cadavers in 2001 and 2002, to $246,200 for 175 in 1999.
The invoices
bear Reid\'s typed name at the bottom but are not signed by him.
Ironically, it was correspondence from
Hafif\'s firm to a lawyer for the University of California that led to the investigation and arrest of Nelson.
The letter, obtained by The Times from UCLA, demanded a payment of $241,000, which the firm claimed UCLA owed
Nelson for body parts that he had returned to the medical school last year. The firm threatened to sue, and its
proposed complaint names Johnson & Johnson as one of Nelson\'s customers. It does not mention any other
companies by name but said some parts were shipped overseas.
People seeking information about relatives who have
donated their bodies to UCLA can call (866) 317-6374.
*
Times staff writers Anna Gorman, Caitlin Liu and
Alan Zarembo contributed to this report.
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