A lawsuit filed by the family of a deceased Alabama inmate who was allegedly sent home for burial without a heart joins a class-action lawsuit from several other families alleging their relatives’ organs were harvested without their knowledge. gave way to the possibility of
The original complaint, filed in December 2023 on behalf of Brandon Clay Dotson’s family, alleges the Alabama Department of Corrections, the department’s senior staff, and Hersink Medical School at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which performs autopsies on the prison system. The university is named as a defendant. This is where families suspect their loved ones’ organs may have been sent for educational or research purposes.
Despite Dotson’s family demanding in court for the “immediate return” of the heart, authorities have been unable to explain the organ’s whereabouts for more than 70 days.
Since the accusations, four more families in Alabama have approached Dotson family attorney Lauren Faraino, alleging that their loved ones had their organs removed, too, and in some cases all of them.
Alabama inmate’s missing heart remains missing after 50 days, family claims
Days after the death of her brother Kelvin Moore on July 21st, Simone Moore was photographed carrying a bag allegedly containing his organs. (Courtesy of Simone Moore)
Falaino said she is preparing a class action lawsuit against the DOC and the school for unauthorized organ harvesting and believes the missing organs are “definitely part of a pattern.”
The family of Kelvin Moore, 43, questions the DOC’s claim that their relative died of a fentanyl overdose. But they were left with no way to confirm his cause of death after the family’s funeral director told them most of his organs were missing.
Moore was on the phone with his mother just an hour before being notified of his death by phone from the prison chaplain at Limestone Correctional Facility, Moore’s brother told Fox News Digital.
Six days later, the family’s funeral director called UAB’s pathology lab to inquire about the organs and was reportedly told that someone from the funeral home might come to retrieve them.
Within an hour, the family said they received a call from a chaplain at the same prison asking if the family would consider donating Moore’s organs.
Body of inmate who died in Alabama prison returned to family without heart: lawsuit
Kelvin Moore was 43 years old at the time of his death at St. Clair Correctional Facility and died in July. He taught GED classes in prison and was a prolific drummer before his incarceration, his brother told FOX News Digital. (Courtesy of Simone Moore)
“My brother said, ‘What don’t you understand? We don’t want to donate to him,'” Simone Moore recalled. “We feel helpless knowing that they entered his body and removed his organs. This is the most barbaric act anyone could experience. It’s disgusting, disrespectful and… We are outraged.”
Simone Moore said she and her sister retrieved Kelvin’s organs from the UAB facility themselves and drove home with heavy red biohazard bags, not wanting to leave the job to someone else. .
“We were driving with my brother’s vital organs in his hands. Or it could have been water, or it could have been a sock. We don’t know, we didn’t open it.” said an emotional Simone Moore. “If we had to exhume his body, [they] I’ll be there when they hand it to me.
“It’s incomprehensible and inconceivable that someone would go to such lengths to remove organs from a body,” he continued. “Even if there was a reason for a biopsy or autopsy, why not put it back together?”
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Brandon Dotson, 43, was found dead in his cell on Nov. 21. His family did not receive his body for another five days and were unable to hold an open casket funeral due to “severe decomposition.” The man’s heart was missing from his chest cavity. (United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama)
Moore comes from a Baptist family “under the auspices that all that we come into this world will return with us.”
Charlene Drake, whose affidavit is included in Dotson’s court documents, lost all but her eyes after her incarcerated 74-year-old father, Charles Edward Singleton, died in November 2021. He said that he was returned with his organs missing.
Despite multiple calls and voicemails to UAB’s pathology lab, she said under oath that “nothing was provided” to her family. [with] An explanation of where his organs are located. ”
A third family in Tuscaloosa also had relatives who had lost all their organs reach out to Falaino, she said. Like Moore’s family, a fourth family also sought and received organ donations. Faraino said they are awaiting the results of DNA tests to determine if they are the correct set.
Prisoner Charles Edward Singleton, 74, was returned to his family with all his organs missing except for his eyes, according to his family. (Courtesy of Lauren Falaino)
Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden told FOX News Digital that organs are typically removed during the autopsy process and placed in a body cavity for burial. Baden said if an inmate dies in prison, an autopsy must be performed unless a judge approves of his family’s objections to the process.
Dr Baden said coroners typically only retain small internal tissue samples for post-mortem examinations.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Falaino told Fox News Digital.[ed] must be made [this] “I will be on the phone with many families,” he said, insisting that each had a “right to know.”
UAB, which conducts many of the Alabama DOC’s post-mortem examinations, previously told Fox News Digital that it had “reviewed records showing that UAB…was not performing post-mortem examinations.” [Dotson’s] autopsy. ”
The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences conducted an autopsy on Dotson and is also named in the family’s lawsuit.
However, Falaino said other inmates whose families came forward were autopsied by the school on behalf of DOC, but none of those inmates were organ donors.
The lawsuit cites the Alabama DOC’s recent history of allegedly donating “human organs and tissues” to medical students for “laboratory training.”
“Given the number of autopsies completed by the university and the income received from the prison, there must be dozens to hundreds of families affected,” Professor Falaino said.
“Even after he’s gone, you’re still robbing him of his dignity,” Simone Moore, Kelvin Moore’s brother, told FOX News Digital. “We were devastated as a family.” (Courtesy of Simone Moore)
In 2018, a group of medical students approached the school’s medical ethics committee with concerns that an alarming percentage of the organs used in pathology classes came from Alabama prisons.
A former UAB medical student, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said 13 of the approximately 170 students in his class started the group after noticing “an odd number of samples taken from incarcerated people during class.” He said it was formed.
After the students expressed their concerns to their medical ethics professor, they were asked to devise a presentation to the ethics committee.
In response, the student told Fox News Digital, “I got hit on the head.” But after that point, they said, far fewer details about the cadavers used for pathology samples were shared with instructors.
“It is incomprehensible and inconceivable that someone would go to such lengths to remove organs from a body.”
Following an autopsy on an Alabama inmate, the warden of the prison is authorized to approve organ storage, and the board will document the group’s findings in a written decision and determine which organs will be used in certain educational sessions. “Less than one-third” of it was sourced from prisoners, he said. .
“They thought it was offensive that we would suggest that the warden might not have the best interests of Alabama’s inmates at heart,” the student said. “We never questioned the performance of the autopsy; that was a clinical obligation. We took issue with the storage of the samples after the clinical obligation was completed.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, a university spokesperson said that “UAB only performs autopsies with consent or authorization from the appropriate state authority” and that it “complies with the laws governing autopsies.” said.
Regarding the students’ concerns, a spokesperson said they had been “informed by inaccurate data and information” and had “addressed them directly.”
“A panel of medical ethicists reviewed and approved our protocol for the autopsy performed. [on] These are people who are incarcerated,” the university told Fox News Digital.
The Alabama Department of Corrections could not be reached for comment by press time.
“I think this is a problem that’s happening in a lot of places.”
A record 325 prisoners died in the state in 2023, according to Alabama Political Reporter, compared to just seven in nine months in 2015, People reported.
Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice recommended that the state’s prison system “holds inmates under conditions that pose a significant risk of serious harm or death.”
“This is an issue that I imagine is happening in many places,” Dr. Baden told Fox News Digital, citing several previous lawsuits.
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In the early 1990s, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office was sued for removing the brains of more than 20 people without their families’ consent and sending them to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Thousands of British families sued the National Health Service in 2009 for keeping their loved ones’ tissues and organs, according to the National Library of Medicine.
