The former director of UCLA’s Willed Body Program and his associate were charged with felony and arrested Wednesday for allegedly selling body parts from cadavers that had been donated to the university for research.
Henry Reid, who was the director of the program from May 1997 to March 2004, is accused of giving body parts to Ernest Nelson, who owned of Empire Anatomical Co., who then allegedly sold hundreds of parts to private medical, pharmaceutical and hospital research companies, in a scheme that made him more than $1 million between 1999 and 2004, according to the criminal complaint.
According to a release from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, which charged the two men, they attempted to hide what they were doing by creating fake documents that gave Nelson authority to receive body parts.
In a March 2004 interview following his arrest, Nelson said he had gone twice a week to the body freezer in the UCLA Medical Center with a saw to disassemble bodies, as he was collecting knees, hands, torsos and other body parts for research for his 80 to 100 corporate clients, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Reid, who allegedly made $43,000 in the sales, is charged with conspiracy and grand theft, and Nelson is charged with conspiracy, grand theft and tax evasion.
Both are being held on $1 million bail and could not be reached Wednesday.
Now that the men have been charged, they will go to trial, which could take up to several months or a year, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the county district attorney’s office, which announced the charges.
Reid faces up to five years and eight months in jail and Nelson could be sentenced up to seven years and eight months, she said.
The case has been under investigation by the UCPD for three years, since the scandal surfaced in March of 2004, grabbing international headlines and resulting in the program being closed for more than a year.
“For the sake of all parties, it was important to ensure that careful fact-gathering was done to determine whether prosecutions should be instituted, and I applaud the campus investigators for their painstaking work,” acting Chancellor Norman Abrams said in a statement in which he also thanked the families of the donors for their patience during the investigation.
UCPD detective Leo del Rosario, who participated in the investigation, said the UCPD worked until they believed they had built a strong case.
“This is a very complicated case,” he said. “It’s normal for a case of this magnitude to take a significant amount of time to prepare it such that we can do a successful prosecution.”
Gibbons described the case as a very complex one which involved a large amount of money and a long time period, and he said investigators were sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents and bank statements.
The UCPD, which has been in charge of the case from the start, may be contacted over the next several months as the case is tried.
“(The investigation) was complete enough for the DA to press charges, but as they go through it they may come back to us,” said Nancy Greenstein, director of police community services.
There are also several suits pending from relatives of people whose bodies were donated to UCLA, as well as a civil suit from Nelson.
Thomas Brill, Nelson’s civil lawyer, said he has a suspicion that UCLA brought the charges against his client to slow down those lawsuits.
“I’ve never seen any evidence that he’s involved in any criminal activity,” Brill told the Associated Press. “These are all facts that they’ve known for at least three years, so I don’t know why they waited this long to file the charges if they really had something to go on.”
The 2004 incident was the second time in recent years that UCLA’s Willed Body Program encountered problems. In an unsuccessful 1996 suit, donors’ relatives said the program had illegally disposed of thousands of cadavers by mixing the bodies and burying some in landfills.
With reports from Bruin wire services.