An unfolding scandal at UCLA has revived resentment among families who donated relatives' bodies to UCI.
Four families have settled lawsuits with the University of California, Irvine, but at least seven other suits, including a class-action case potentially involving hundreds of people, remain unresolved.
Families said Monday that reading about problems with the UCLA Willed Body Program felt like reliving the series of revelations beginning in August 1999 that more than 300 bodies were unaccounted for at UCI.
Both schools hired their body-donation directors around the same time. Both directors were graduates of Cypress College's mortuary-science program. Both are accused of the same thing: taking bodies that were donated for medical school research and parceling out pieces of them for profit.
Henry Reid, 54, was arrested Saturday at his home in Anaheim. The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that a middleman, Ernest Nelson, who worked with Reid, claims to have cut up and sold as many as 800 bodies.
In light of this latest scandal, all five of the University of California's willed-body programs will be audited, said UC Board of Regents attorney Christopher Patti.
UCLA's attorney, Lou Marlin, said Monday that the school was still trying to determine how oversight of the willed-body program failed.
"Sometimes despite the best efforts of well-meaning people criminals will act criminally," Marlin said. "That doesn't mean improvements can't be made." Marlin disputed Nelson's accounting of the number of cadavers he sold, saying he does not have an official figure but that it likely was much lower than 800.
Dozens of families in Orange County know Marlin well. They have been negotiating with him since 1999, when families first started filing lawsuits against UCI over its willed-body program. Mortician Christopher S. Brown was fired from his $33,000- a-year job as the program's director but never faced criminal penalties, a fact that still riles families who paid Brown directly to have their family members' ashes returned to them. In some cases, they received the wrong ashes.
"I would say we held everybody accountable," said the dean of the UCI medical school, Dr. Thomas C. Cesario, though he conceded there was no official reprimand of anyone other than Brown. "We know the families are distressed. We apologized a number of times."
The school has settled with four families, Patti said. A large group of families represented by attorney Federico Sayre say the school has been close to a settlement with them on several occasions and has gone through at least two rounds of mediation. A trial date in the case has been delayed repeatedly and is now slated for early 2005. UCI's attorneys have sent family members to a psychiatrist hired by the school to test their claims of emotional distress.
Marlin said most of the claims against UCI involved families who were not promised the cremated remains of their loved ones. A proposed settlement of about $150,000 with those families is expected to be heard by a judge this month.
Now that the University of California, Los Angeles, case is in the news, some families say they are anxious to go to trial.
"Public opinion has to be so stacked against the UC system at this point that if this ever goes to trial the award will be so outrageous that any settlement offer they've ever discussed with us will pale in comparison," said Joe Melican, whose father's body was donated to the school in July 1999, just before the irregularities in the program were discovered. "People are just upset with the consistent lack of oversight."
Melican and other family members say the latest case proves that UC system officials were insincere when they promised broad reforms and stronger oversight at all willed-body programs.
"They're saying the same thing now that they said with the UCI case: 'We didn't know anything was going on.' How is that possible?" said Diane Coghill, whose father chose to have his body donated to UCI. "My supervisor can account for every bit of my time. It's just not acceptable for a public institution paid for with our taxes to say they didn't know what was happening."
Cesario pointed to reforms that he said have put the program back on track. The school hired a new director to replace Brown at a higher salary and an assistant, so the delicate task of handling bodies is no longer left up to one person. It placed the willed- body program directly under the supervision of Cesario. And it created a tracking system for monitoring the bodies from the time they enter the program through their final disposition.
"We've taken heroic steps to make sure that it is not only a good program but a model program," said Cesario, who meets weekly with program director Michael Godsey and conducts spot audits.
Families still want answers. Many have never been told how their family members' bodies were used.
UCI auditors accounted for 121 of the 441 cadavers donated to the Willed Body Program between January 1995 and the time the program was shut down temporarily in August 1999. Brown was hired to direct the program in May 1996. Among the bodies in limbo are four cadavers that were left at the school when Brown was fired. They remain unidentified to this day.
Some of the families picketed outside UCI Medical Center last April and are planning to do so again, said Lenore Delnero, whose father's body was donated to UCI in 1997 and allegedly ended up at Orange Coast College.
"Two years after they supposedly had a forensic dentist identify him, we now find out that they had a forensic dentist identify him," Delnero said. "If they cared at all about the families and what they have gone through, why wouldn't they tell us information like that?"
UPDATE
What's new: UCLA officials apologized Monday for the alleged illegal sale of parts of donated bodies. Relatives sued the university, claiming that the remains of their family members were intended for medical research. Police said they searched the Anaheim home of the school's Willed Body Program director, Henry Reid, 54, and the Alta Loma home of Ernest V. Nelson, 46, who allegedly helped sell body parts. Five computers, three firearms and boxes of documents were seized.
What's next: Former California Gov. George Deukmejian will conduct an independent audit. Attorneys representing the family members will seek a court injunction today to stop the cadaver program. The FBI may be brought into the investigation if it is determined that body-parts sales crossed state lines. Another UCLA employee, who is also believed to have accepted money for body parts, has been placed on leave. That person has not been identified or arrested.
Register staff writer Aldrin Brown contributed to this report.
