Hours After Doctors Declared Him Brain Dead, He Woke Up. They Were Taking His Organs

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched “a major initiative to begin reforming the organ transplant system,” it announced Monday. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained, “Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying. … The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”

Anthony Thomas Hoover

According to a partially redacted, eight-page report dated May 28, 2025, HHS received “an allegation of potentially preventable harm to a neurologically injured patient.” This prompted the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the subdepartment of HHS that oversees the organ donation system, to launch an investigation after HRSA Administrator Thomas Engels assumed his post in February.

The New York Times identified that victim as Anthony Thomas Hoover II, then 33 years old, who was hospitalized with a drug overdose in 2021. Hours after a doctor had declared him brain-dead, Hoover awakened to find medical staff preparing to remove his organs. “Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, officials still tried to move forward.” Hospital staff ultimately became “uncomfortable with the amount of reflexes” Hoover showed, and a doctor ultimately refused to remove him from life-support. The man ultimately survived.

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The Times also identified the organization preparing to remove Hoover’s organs as Network for Hope, a federally-funded “organ procurement organization” (OPO) that operates in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee hauled Network for Hope CEO Barry Massa in for a hearing on Tuesday, where representatives expressed their astonishment at Hoover’s story. “This seems to be a story more fitting for a horror movie than a congressional hearing, frankly,” said Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla).

Massa could only respond with assent. “Seeing someone like that myself, personally, yes, I think I would be disturbed.” In a Tuesday statement, Massa declared that “patient safety is our top priority. Network for Hope looks forward to working collaboratively with HHS and HRSA and encourages the development of policies that support the betterment of the organ transplant system as a whole.”

Trump Administration Review

Such improvement in America’s organ transplant system was not forthcoming before the Trump administration exerted serious pressure. Despite the shocking details of Hoover’s case, the Membership and Professional Standards Committee (MPSC) of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) “closed the case without further action,” even after Network for Hope’s reply “did not include the patient-level materials or administrative documents requested by the MPSC,” according to the HRSA report.

HHS noted that this premature closure happened on the watch of the Biden administration, where the Trump HHS demanded the case be reopened. “HRSA directed the OPTN to reopen the investigation and reiterate the request for documents,” the report stated. But, after a second swipe, the OPTN still concluded that, “overall, there were no major concerns or patterns identified. While no major issues were found, reviewers pointed out a few small areas of improvement.”

By contrast, HRSA’s own investigation “revealed clear negligence” by the organ procurement organization (OPO), said HHS.

The HRSA investigation reviewed Network for Hope files on 351 patients “for whom organ donation was attempted … but from whom organs were not procured,” the report described. Or, put differently, these were 351 patients for whom organ donation was “authorized not recovered” (ANR). Among this number, HRSA found concerning features with 103 cases (29.3%), a shockingly high percentage to describe as “no major concerns or patterns.”

This number included 73 patients (20.8%) who displayed “initial or subsequent” neurological activity, indicating that they were still alive at the time the organization tried to harvest their organs. “At least 28 (8.0%) patients had no cardiac time of death noted, suggesting potential survival to hospital discharge.” Such was the case with Hoover, who left the hospital four years ago and is still alive.

“In contrast to the OPTN report … HRSA found a concerning pattern of risk to neurologically injured patients,” their report stated. The problems they identified included:

• Poor assessment of patients’ neurological function, such that “multiple patients were documented as evincing pain or discomfort” while staff were preparing to harvest their organs;
• Poor coordination with hospital staff, including “OPO staff preempting [patients’ primary medical] teams’ concerns about planned care”;
• Insufficient care taken when obtaining informed consent from next-of-kin, such as “approaching potential donors’ family members that they believed to be under the influence of illicit substances”; and
• Improper collection and coding of medical data, such as describing patients with “evidence of drug overdose or intoxication” with a non-drug-related cause of death.

The HRSA report explained that the miscoding is relevant to patient safety because patients under the influence of drugs may temporarily show “depressed mental status” not because they are terminally ill, but because of the “slow clearance of the effects of chemical intoxication.” In other words, like Hoover, overdose patients might seem dead because of the lingering effects of drugs, then gradually recover. If organ harvesters fail to recognize or record the effect of drugs on the patient, they may prematurely harvest organs from a patient set to fully recover.

The HSRA report found this to be a significant problem. Out of 98 cases where patients were admitted for drug-related reasons, Network for Hope reported drug intoxication as the cause of death in only 28 cases. More specifically, they added, “Twenty of the ANR cases reviewed by HRSA, including that of the index patient [Hoover], involved failure to recognize high neurologic function in a victim of drug intoxication. In 15 (75%) of those cases, the OPO’s documented mechanism of death did not reflect overdose as the inciting event for the neurologic injury.”

Assessing the Motives

Amid the mountains of statistics and medical jargon, it’s important to keep the larger picture in view. Some 170 million Americans have registered as organ donors, according to the OPTN, which means they have agreed to allow doctors to harvest their organs for transplant into patients who desperately need them. Of course, because these organs are necessary to sustain life (with the exception of a single kidney), organ donors only consent to donate their organs upon their own death. With this consent, there comes an expectation that doctors will confirm the patient is dead before harvesting their organs.

But there are other complicating factors. Due to the fragile, organic nature of living human organs, they can be harvested after only a small fraction of all deaths, and they are only usable for transplant for a short window of time after the donor dies. Doctors are understandably eager to begin the organ harvesting process as soon as possible, lest they miss the window entirely.

Additionally, doctors participating in the organ donation ecosystem recognize the critical shortage of organs available for transplant. “Last year, there were more than 48,000 transplants in the US, but more than 103,000 people were on waiting lists,” reported CNN. “About 13 people in the United States die every day waiting for a transplant.” This underscores the laudable reason behind the entire organ donation system: saving human lives.

The tight schedule, critical shortage, and laudable goal all combine to create intense pressure on organ procurement organizations to obtain as many as possible. According to The New York Times, two former employees of Network of Hope said “higher-ups” tried to pressure hospital staff to proceed with harvesting Hoover’s organs. “If it had not been for that physician [who refused to end life support], we absolutely, 1,000% would have moved forward,” said Natasha Miller, an employee in the room. Three more former employees confirmed seeing similar cases.

An Ethical Duty

Although these factors are understandable, the resulting pressure they create is faulty. While a successful transplant may save a life, harvesting the organs from a patient who has not yet died also takes a life. Organ harvesters do not get to play God by deciding who lives and who dies. In fact, the results show that organ harvesters are often mistaken about whether patients actually will die.

This makes proper safeguards around organ harvesting a matter of human dignity. Because every person is made in God’s image, he or she possesses inherent dignity and worth. As fellow creatures and image-bearers we have no right to prematurely end the life of another person, even for a worthy goal such as saving a life. Christians must therefore speak boldly and unequivocally about the moral duty to ensure that a person has actually died before performing operations (such as organ harvesting) that would certainly end that person’s life.

Whether from temporary mental impairment or terminal illness, patients at risk of premature organ harvesting do not have the ability to speak up for themselves. This places them alongside other vulnerable categories of people who need special recognition and protection. Those with the ability to influence public policy have a duty to “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Proverbs 31:8).

Another factor of the current organ harvesting system further sharpens this duty. HRSA’s review suggests that irregular organ harvesting was more prevalent in smaller and rural hospitals, compared to larger and urban ones. This suggests that the victims of premature harvesting are more likely to be poor and not well-connected, increasing their vulnerability and need for a third-party advocate.

A Systemic Problem

The second-most disturbing revelation in the HRSA report (after the fact that organ harvesters may be killing patients) is that the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) failed to find any major problems. In fact, Network for Hope told CNN that after reviewing the case, it “remains confident that accepted practices and approved protocols were followed.”

This “suggests systemic concerns” that call for broader reform, said the HRSA, which their new initiative hopes to achieve.

But such reform will not be easy. Already, the Trump administration’s HHS has encountered stiff opposition from the organ harvesting industry. In April, eight members of the OPTN Board of Directors resigned their positions, complaining about the Trump administration’s attempt to exert greater government oversight. “We have no confidence in HRSA’s management of the OPTN and this is the main reason for our resignation,” they concluded.

Several days later, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons reiterated the concerns expressed in the resignation letter, urging “HRSA to PAUSE and REASSESS the direction of OPTN Modernization by engaging with the transplant community to develop the best path forward.” The same day, the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations (AOPO) also criticized HRSA’s new approach.

These responses constitute angry warnings that the Trump administration will likely encounter serious opposition from the organ procurement and transplant industry. But the Trump administration is right to press such reform through, over the objections of industry participants, who as likely as not are part of the problem. As the HHS noted, an industry that shows “systemic disregard for sanctity of life” needs urgent reform.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview. Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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