Dead Teen's Parents Claim Hospital Killed Him, Harvested Organs

I think the possibility of a doctor murdering someone or expediting someone's death to harvest organs is legitimate concern over organ donation.


FOXNews.com - Dead Teen's Parents Claim Hospital Killed Him, Harvested Organs - Health News | Current Health News | Medical News

PITTSBURGH — The parents of an 18-year-old Ohio man who suffered a brain injury while snowboarding claim in a lawsuit that doctors at a northwestern Pennsylvania hospital intentionally killed him so they could harvest his organs.

The lawsuit claims that Hamot Medical Center doctors and a representative of the Center For Organ Recovery and Education caused Gregory Jacobs' death by administering medication and by removing his breathing tube, causing him to suffocate.

"But for the intentional trauma or asphyxiation of Gregory Jacobs, he would have lived, or, at the very least, his life would have been prolonged," the lawsuit said.

The suit was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh by Jacobs' parents, Michael and Teresa Jacobs, of Bellevue, Ohio. It seeks more than $5 million for their son's pain and suffering, medical bills and funeral expenses, plus punitive damages.

The hospital denied the parents' accusations.

"We express our deepest sympathies to the Jacobs' family, but Hamot Medical Center absolutely did not remove Gregory Jacobs' organs while he was alive," Lucia Conti, a hospital spokeswoman, said in a statement issued Wednesday night. "Any claims otherwise are completely baseless."

The Center for Organ Recovery and Education, a Pittsburgh-based organization that helps hospitals procure donated tissue, declined to comment.

Are they going to go to the Harvested Organ bank and search for the harvested organs?
I don't know what to make of this. Guess sometimes we do put too much faith in the people with the stethoscope.

It's up to the parents to prove that their son could have indeed survived on life support and that they did not want their son taken off life support at the time.

I'll start paying attention when the parents can provide some solid evidence.

until then, it just strikes me as paranoid conspiracy theories. or perhaps just greed.

DA finds no crime in Pa. hospital organ harvesting

Erie County District Attorney Brad Foulk said Friday that he reviewed medical files from Hamot (HAM'-ut) Medical Center in Erie. He says the hospital followed proper procedures when they declared Gregory Jacobs dead and got permission to take his organs in March 2007.

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they are going to have a tough time winning that lawsuit.

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. How long a doctor spends on trying to revive a patient before organ harvesting begins is completely up to the discretion of the attending physician. As there are cases where people have been clinically dead for 20 minutes or more, yet revived, it casts some doubt on the revivification process prior to organ harvesting.

The national organ banks place specific criteria on how soon the organs must be harvested following death, and this increases pressure on doctors to cease their recusitation procedures perhaps earlier than warranted. This family has the burden of proving that the doctors did not do everything they could to save their son prior to deferring to organ harvesting criteria.

Part of me feels like it is simply another abuse of the tort system, and another part of me knows that some doctors really don't try hard enough to revive people, especially in understaffed, overburdened hospitals.