Beyond permission An agreement to donate daughter's eyes, organs and skin leads to harvesting of her bones -- against her family's wishes. April 16, 2000 MEMENTOS: Lucinda Ramirez keeps a shrine to her daughter, Heather, in the entryway of the family's Tucson home. Bones were taken from Heather's body without consent by the American Red Cross. It took a two-year court fight to retrieve the bones. The mother holds a framed essay written by her daughter describing her goals.Click image for larger photo. Photo by MICHAEL GOULDING ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Related stories: � Tissue supply, demand make for odd alliances � Body parts good as gold for largest nonprofit tissue bank � Donors don't realize they are fueling a lucrative business � Mandatory IRS forms offer clues to charities' practices � Use of bodies taboo in some cultures, encouraged in others By WILLIAM HEISEL The Orange County Register TUCSON � Heather Ramirez dreamed of leaving her hometown, moving to California and living on the beach. She never made it, but her bones did. Her journey testifies to how families can be emotionally crushed in the rush to harvest body parts. "That was the body that I lotioned and powdered and took to the doctor when it had a rash and kissed every night, so whether that body is alive and breathing, it's still my baby's body," her mother, Lucinda Ramirez, said. In March 1995, Heather Ramirez was 19, a year out of high school and working at a grocery-store deli. After a long night partying, Ramirez lost control of her truck at a bend in the road. She was thrown out the window and killed. Greg and Lucinda Ramirez knew they would be asked to donate their daughter's organs and tissue. Lucinda Ramirez was a nursing assistant at Tucson Medical Center, where her daughter's body was taken. They agreed to give Heather's corneas to a local eye bank. To the American Red Cross they gave her heart valves, veins and skin, but not her bones. The Red Cross took them anyway. Red Cross officials said it was an honest mistake, that the technician who harvested the tissue misread the consent form. Court records show the technician also forged documents to mask the error. The Ramirezes sued, and more than two years later the Red Cross returned the bones. "We gave something so precious to them, and they betrayed us," Lucinda Ramirez, 42, said. "When I first found out, I just sat down and cried." The family thought bone donation, more than anything else, would change the way Heather saw herself in the mirror. It's hard to explain � why skin and veins from her legs could be donated, but not bones � but the Ramirezes said it just felt right. When she died, a hospital worker crossed out the bone section of the consent form. But a Red Cross technician removed her leg bones. When the family found out, the technician forged Greg Ramirez's initials to make it appear he had consented, court records show. "We understand that this has caused the Ramirez family some distress, and we are saddened by that," Red Cross spokesman Mike Fulwider said. "We responded by doing everything we could to locate and return Heather's bones to the family." Sitting in his easy chair, a life-size portrait of his daughter looming behind him, Greg Ramirez can barely rein in his rage five years later. "It was like they raped her," Greg Ramirez, 46, said, pounding his fists into the armrests. Like many donor families, the couple didn't want to know the details of how their daughter's body was harvested. Through the legal fight, they were confronted over and over by the image of her body being carved up and packaged. They wanted to remember her as a spunky child on the verge of adulthood. "She was just starting to figure out what she wanted to do with her life," Lucinda Ramirez said. "Whatever it was, it had to be on the ocean. She wanted to live on the ocean in California." Her bones did make it to California, briefly. Greg and Lucinda Ramirez sent them to a laboratory in California to be DNA tested, after the Red Cross returned the bones in October 1997. The Ramirezes said they weren't taking any chances. The Red Cross also paid the family an undisclosed amount of money. "We didn't trust anybody at that point," Greg Ramirez said. "I don't think any of us would donate anything now." PREVIOUS | NEXT | INDEX Body parts good as gold for largest nonprofit tissue bank PROFILE: Bones in basement bring big bucks to agency. April 16, 2000 COLD CASH: Twenty bags of human bones, worth $680,000, are stored in a basement cooler at the Musculoskeletal Foundation. Bruce Stroever is president of the bank. Photo by MICHAEL GOULDING ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Related stories: � Tissue supply, demand make for odd alliances � Beyond permission � Donors don't realize they are fueling a lucrative business � Mandatory IRS forms offer clues to charities' practices � Use of bodies taboo in some cultures, encouraged in others By MARK KATCHES The Orange County Register http://www.ocregister.com/health/body/day1_knox.shtml EDISON, N.J. � About 900 bags of human bones are stuffed inside basement freezers in an industrial complex about a mile from the New Jersey Turnpike. As tissue banks go, this is Fort Knox. The bones are worth about $30 million. Each bag contains the major bones from the legs, arms and hips of a single donor and weighs roughly 35 pounds. The freezers are the first stop for body parts shipped from around the country to the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, the world's largest nonprofit tissue bank. Even the bank's veteran employees have difficulty with the eerie, dark cellar. "This is the creepiest part of the business," says the tissue bank's president Bruce Stroever, opening a freezer full of bones. "We had a shipping person who quit because the packages were talking to her. She lasted about a month and a half." The bones are stored at 92 degrees below Fahrenheit until they are ready to be made into products. The nonprofit foundation lists 650 uses for body parts in its glossy catalog. This is where the prolific Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb and the phonograph in the late 1800s. In 1954, the township took the name of the inventor. Now, in the year 2000, a new era of discovery is under way. The tissue bank's leaders are creating new products made from human remains � small pieces of crafted bone that cost about $2,000 each. The new products are part of the reason that the bones in cold storage are so valuable to the tissue bank and its corporate partners. The tissue bank's President Bruce Stroever expects 4,400 dead bodies to pass through this year, generating $150 million in sales � or $34,000 a bag � for the tissue bank. No other nonprofit tissue bank comes close to the foundation in size. The American Red Cross, anticipating $47 million in tissue sales this year, places a distant second. While the raw materials are stored in the foundation's basement, the products are crafted in clean rooms upstairs and neatly arranged in an adjacent warehouse. On one January day, the warehouse inventory included 25,000 bottles of bone and tendon products worth an additional $3 million. The bank keeps the donor names confidential but will share sketchy details about the people whose bodies are made into the products lining the shelves. A freeze-dried Achilles tendon from a 31-year-old Utah man sat wrapped in gauze and priced at $430. He died in a tractor accident last summer. On a shelf below were bottled bone chips, resembling grated parmesan cheese, from a 49-year-old New Yorker who died after a heart attack last July. PREVIOUS | NEXT | INDEX <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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