Kentucky man declared brain-dead and prepared for organ harvesting lived to dance at sister's wedding

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They are trying to play God," Rhorer claimed. "They're almost, you know, picking and choosing - they're going to take this person to save these people.

Donna Rhorer, sister of a Kentucky man who was declared brain dead and whose organs were about to be harvested until he showed too many signs of life for doctors to proceed, as reported by The Post Millennial.

Congress concerned about organ donation system

In the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) oversees and coordinates the activities of Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs), establishing policies and monitoring their performance to ensure effective organ donation and transplantation. A recent hearing convened by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce addressed systemic failures within this system  UNOS has been the sole contractor since 1986. Serious concerns about oversight and potential conflicts of interest were raised.

Organs lost in transit

Among the issues discussed was the fact that over 28,000 donated organs do not reach recipients each year, alongside notable transportation failures — such as a human heart left on a plane and a kidney mistakenly thrown away. During the hearing (clip below), Subcommittee Chair Morgan Griffith questioned why, if Amazon can track a pair of socks, the same cannot be done for something as critical as a human organ.

Donors not dead

Another significant issue raised was donor safety, with concerns that patients are often declared brain dead too hastily. In some instances, organ harvesting was halted due to signs of life, while in others, individuals may have still been alive while their organs were being removed. Dr. Robert Cannon, an associate professor of surgery and surgical director for liver transplant at the University of Alabama at Birmingham was a witness at the hearing (@54:20). He shared a personal account of such an incident:

I've experienced this myself, unfortunately, as a donor surgeon. We went on a procurement. The donor had been declared brain dead. We were actually in the midst of the operation when the anesthetist at the head of the table said they thought the patient breathed, which would essentially negate the declaration of brain death.

What Dr. [Seth] Karp [surgeon in chief at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who testified immediately before Dr. Cannon] said is true—no one really knew what to do. The [OPO] staff on the ground called their administrator, whose recommendation was, 'Oh, I think this is just a brain stem reflex; we recommend you proceed,' which, of course, would have been murder if we had done so. So yes, we closed the patient, we got out of Dodge, and we wanted nothing to do with it. So these things happen.

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. . . The patient was ultimately declared later, and they called us two days later, and of course, we wanted nothing to do with that because we couldn't trust the process. Every transplant surgeon probably has a story like this. (Emphases added.)

Not a rare occurrence

Greg Segal, founder and CEO of Organize, an organization focused on reforming the organ donation system, informed the committee members (@54:14) that he has received numerous reports of donors being alive at the time of harvesting.

I receive allegations like this with fairly alarming regularity...

What I will say, which I think is the biggest statement on the safety of the system, is I know many organ procurement organization coordinators who are no longer registered organ donors themselves because of what they have seen out in the field.

Was alive but declared brain dead

Testimony submitted to the committee, and about which Mr. Segal was questioned, regarding individuals declared brain dead but who were alive when their organs were about to be or were removed, included the case of "TJ" Hoover II. As reported by the Western Journal, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II woke up as doctors were preparing to harvest his organs for transplant. Author C. Douglas Golden related that Hoover was brought to the hospital in October 2021 as a result of a drug overdose. He had signed an organ donor card, so after doctors told his sister that there were no reflexes or brain waves, he was prepared for surgery so they could harvest his organs.

 “October 26, we were told there were no reflexes, he had no reflexes, there was no brain activity, no brain waves,” Donna Rhorer, Hoover’s sister, told WKYT in Thursday’s report. Thus, to the hospital, he was brain dead.

As he was being wheeled to the operating room, his sister said, his eyes could be seen moving but doctors said it was reflexes and meaningless. Keneci News tweeted about the incident:

However, the surgery was called off after an hour when the doctor came out and told his sister that her brother wasn’t ready. She says that she later learned that he had woken up during a heart catheterization earlier in the morning. 

“About an hour into it, the doctor came out and got us. He said he wasn’t ready. He woke up. But we also hadn’t been told during his heart catheterization that morning, he woke up then. If we had known that, then clearly we would have known he wasn’t brain dead,” she said.

“He made several attempts to say, ‘Hey, I’m here.’ But it was kind of ignored. They finally stopped the procedure because he was showing too many signs of life.”

Golden, who had referenced NPR's reporting of the incident, wrote that NPR featured a picture of a very much alive Hoover dancing at his sister's wedding in 2023.

Organ preservationist traumatized

Natasha Miller, the  Kentucky Organ Donor Association (KODA) organ preservationist at the hospital at the time, was traumatized.  She said she had tried alerting the doctors that Hoover was moving.

“He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” she said.

“And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly.”

At that point the doctors were no longer going to harvest the organs, not wanting to be responsible for killing him.

The doctors then said they wanted out.

“The procuring surgeon, he was like, ‘I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it,’ ” Miller told the public broadcaster. “It was very chaotic. Everyone was just very upset.”

The KODA coordinator at the hospital called her boss who said to find another doctor and proceed, whereupon she told her that there were no other doctors. As a result of this incident, several employees at KODA, including organ preservationist Nyckoletta Martin, resigned in response to the incident.

 Martin, who has dedicated her life to organ donation and transplantation, voiced her alarm over the lack of protections for donors, stating, “It’s very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen.” Although she wasn't directly involved in the case, she reviewed the notes and feared she might be called to act on it.

Martin said that the incident took its toll on some of the employees, including herself, who needed therapy afterward. 

“Several of us that were employees needed to go to therapy. It took its toll on a lot of people, especially me,” she added.

Declared brain-dead, squeezes her mother's hand

In February 2016, Lifenews reported that a 14 year old girl was hit by bullets during a shooting rampage and was presumed to be brain-dead. However, her mother asked her to squeeze her hand if she could hear her, and she did. 

The teen, identified as 14-year-old Abigail Kopf, was one of several people who were shot at a Kalamazoo Cracker Barrel on Saturday, according to CNN. . . . 

. . . 

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, doctors discussed the possibility that Kopf may be declared brain dead. Kopf’s mother asked her to squeeze her hand again if the teen could hear her, and she did, he said. Then the doctor asked Kopf to give a thumbs up, and she lifted both thumbs in response, the officer said.

The Daily Mail reported that she was already having her body prepared so they could harvest her organs when she squeezed her mother’s hand.

Ignored signs of life till she opened her eyes

The Christian Institute reported the case of a New York woman who was declared dead and whose organs were going to be harvested despite signs of life. It was only after she opened her eyes and looked at the light that they stopped the procedure.

Mother-of-three Colleen S Burns was declared dead, and her family agreed to the withdrawal of life support and the removal of her organs.

But despite other signs that she was in fact still alive, it wasn’t until she opened her eyes and looked up at the lights that doctors called off the organ-harvesting process.

Doctors missed signs of life

The investigation found that doctors missed key indications that the patient had not suffered irreversible brain damage, such as her nostrils flaring outside the operating theatre and her toes curling following a reflex test.

Yet a nurse gave Colleen Burns a sedative twenty minutes after these observations were made.

Two medical experts reviewed the case for a local news outlet.

Dr Charles Wetli, a nationally known forensic pathologist, said once signs of life appeared, the organ-harvesting process should have stopped.

And Dr David Mayer, an associate professor of clinical surgery at New York Medical College, said: “If you have to sedate them or give them pain medication, they’re not brain dead and you shouldn’t be harvesting their organs.”

NY Organ Donor Network accused

Auric Media, in a post about the fallacy of brain death,[1] referenced a lawsuit against The New York Organ Donor Network by Air Force Combat veteran and former nurse, Patrick McMahon. According to the lawsuit, the nonprofit is accused of “bullying doctors into declaring patients brain dead when they are still alive.” 

He provided examples of individuals who should not have been declared brain dead. One example is of a 19-year-old who was struggling to breathe and showed signs of brain activity yet they went ahead with the organ harvesting. The suit alleges that Network officials coerced the surgeon.

The lawsuit . . . cites a 19-year-old car crash victim who was still struggling to breathe and showing signs of brain activity when doctors gave the green light for his organs to be harvested.

Network officials including director Michael Goldstein allegedly bullied Nassau University Medical Center staff into declaring the teen dead, stating during a conference call: ‘This kid is dead, you got that?’

But McMahon said he believed the 19-year-old could have recovered.

Other incidents he highlighted were that of a man who was showing signs of brain activity yet, doctors harvested his organs anyway, and of a woman who was declared dead after an overdose but whose body was still jerking.

The suit claims that a man was admitted to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a month later, again showing brain activity.

It claims McMahon protested but was blown off by hospital and donor network staff, and the man was declared brain dead and his organs harvested.

The woman, he related, was given a paralyzing agent as her organs were about to be harvested because her body was jerking. McMahon noted that if she was moving she wasn't dead.

In November 2011, a woman admitted to Staten Island University Hospital after a drug overdose was declared brain dead and her organs were about to be harvested when McMahon noticed that she was being given ‘a paralyzing anesthetic’ because her body was still jerking.

‘She was having brain function when they were cutting into her on the table,’ McMahon told MailOnline.

‘He had given her a paralyser and there’s no reason to give someone who is dead a paralyser.’
He said he confronted the person who gave it to her and he was speechless.

‘Finally he said he was told to do it because while they were cutting her chest open she was moving her chest around.
And a paralyzer only paralyses you, it does nothing for the pain,’ he said.

McMahon identified as a troublemaker by Network staff

According to the lawsuit, when McMahon probed further on the disturbing case another network employee told hospital staff he was ‘an untrained troublemaker with a history of raising frivolous issues and questions.’

Don't sign an organ donor card

The dead can't donate

In The Gold Report's previous reporting on this topic, it was noted that organs cannot be retrieved from someone who has died, so declaring people brain dead in order to harvest their organs creates a serious moral and ethical issue.

Dr. Byrne said this term crept into the medical profession following the world’s first heart transplant in 1968. It has since been defined and redefined and is now being replaced by another term known as cardiac death, he noted.

He said donated organs, without exception, must come from a living person. Within minutes of “true death,” which, he explained, is the cessation of circulation and respiration, the organs will begin to die. This is why, when organs are removed from a donor, the beating heart is always taken last. “You cannot get any organs from cadavers,” he noted. “If you’re really dead, then no organs can be extracted.”

Dr. Heidi Klessig is featured on CHD TV discouraging people from signing organ donor cards since people declared brain dead are not biologically dead, as Organ Harvesting New's Ethan Huff related.

“When you go to sign up to be an organ donor, you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and you see the brightly-colored signs saying ‘give the gift of life,’ you’re not offered a consent form,” she explains in the video below.

“You’re never told that when you become a brain-dead organ donor, you are not biologically dead. These people have a beating heart. Their lungs are working. Their digestive system works. Their kidneys work.”

Children's Health Defense tweeted her warning:

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⇛ If organs from dead donors cannot be used for transplant, does that mean that every time a donor has a vital organ removed the cause of death is actually the removal of that organ, as Dr. Cannon says?