An embalmer hired by the UCLA medical school to keep better track of donated cadavers has been arrested on suspicion of grand theft, part of an investigation into allegations that he and another employee sold corpses and body parts for profit.
Henry Reid, director of the willed-body program, was taken in handcuffs from his Anaheim, Calif., home Saturday after campus police officers searched his property and left with several boxes. Reid wouldn’t comment as he was taken into custody. He was being held at Los Angeles County Jail.
The university will seek felony charges against Reid, said Nancy Greenstein, director of police community services for the UCLA Police Department.
Police are investigating whether Reid, 54, and another employee falsified documents to sell bodies and parts of bodies for personal gain, said sources close to the investigation. UCLA has placed the two employees on leave.
UCLA’s willed-body program is the oldest in the United States. It receives about 175 donated bodies every year and has a list of more than 11,000 people who have agreed to donate their bodies for use by researchers and medical students.
The school has placed a guard on the seventh floor of UCLA Medical Center, where cadavers worth thousands of dollars to biomedical companies are stored in a large freezer.
The human-tissue industry is thought to be worth $500 million a year. The trade is supposedly non-profit because it is illegal to earn money from the sale of human body parts. But the law allows middlemen to cover their costs by charging “reasonable” fees. Reasonable has become a matter of interpretation. As demand has expanded, so have prices and the opportunities for fraud.
Reid was named director in 1997, a year after the school was sued by the families of cadaver donors for failing to properly dispose of their remains. Families have accused UCLA of putting ashes from cremated bodies into trash bins taken to a landfill and then lying to loved ones.
UCLA attorneys in court papers claimed as recently as last month that they had fixed all problems in the cadaver program. Attorneys for families and donors were seeking an order requiring the university to treat corpses properly. But court Commissioner Bruce Mitchell tentatively ruled on Feb. 10 that UCLA had proven the program was working well under Reid.
“There is evidence that [Reid] . . . instituted comprehensive new protocols, which are being followed and which comply with industry standards,” Mitchell wrote in his preliminary ruling.
Louis Marlin, a lawyer for UCLA, said he asked Mitchell to delay signing a final ruling after learning of the latest allegations.
Reid testified in a November 2002 deposition that he did not recall hearing any allegations of the illegal sale of body parts at UCLA. His assistant testified in January that UCLA did not sell body parts obtained through the willed-body program.
A review of depositions in the 1996 case shows that several people familiar with UCLA’s cadaver program worried that body parts were being sold.
Joseph Delgado testified in a 1999 deposition that cadavers often could not be identified, which prevented the crematorium from disposing of them. In response, he said, UCLA employees would cut the heads off the cadavers and call the crematorium again to pick up the bodies. Cadavers without heads do not require identification.
Delgado said he would be called back later to pick up the heads, according to the deposition.