The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

At 9:30 am on May 25, preparatory plans began for a heart transplant. One group would remove the donor’s heart and another group, led by Lower, would remove the recipient’s heart and replace it with the donor’s. Hume, excited at the prospect of MCV’s first heart transplant, told his staff to find Bruce’s family and obtain consent to use his organs. At the organizational meeting was Dr. Abdullah Fatteh, the assistant medical examiner. Because the medical examiner, Geoffrey Mann, was out of town and unreachable, permission for the transplant rested on Fatteh. At this point, he advised Hume to find Bruce’s next of kin and gain their consent. A 19th-century law, still in effect, mandated a 24-hour waiting period from the declaration of death to use an unclaimed body for research.

At 11:30 am, Bruce was deemed apneic, or unable to breathe. He was placed on a ventilator, and physicians expected his death soon. At one o’clock that afternoon, Bruce had no brain activity and was unable to breathe on his own. The police were still unable to find his family at two o’clock. At 2:30 pm, William Tucker received a phone call from someone at the hospital telling him that something strange was occurring. William called the hospital and was told that Bruce was in the operating room. A friend of Bruce’s, Evelyn Gregory, went to MCV in search of Bruce and was told nothing.

At 3:33 pm, Bruce was declared dead and taken off artificial life support. Two minutes later, Hume got permission from Fatteh to remove Bruce’s organs given the declaration of death, thus violating the legally mandated 24-hour waiting period. The surgeons believed that they had made good-faith efforts to contact his relatives. However, no one had checked with the front desk at the hospital to see if anyone had inquired about Bruce. His heart and kidneys were removed in a recovery room. His heart was cooled, and Lower placed it in Klett’s body.

At 4:30 pm, William Tucker called the hospital for the third time and was told that his brother had been moved to St. Philip Hospital. When William went to MCV at six o’clock that evening, a group of white physicians informed him that Bruce had died. He was not told about the details of his brother’s death or that Bruce’s organs had been removed. Jones notes that Bruce was profiled as a charity patient and was considered socially dead. He was treated as a corpse.

Institutional representatives provided the first report of the heart transplant. Seeking to control the story, MCV was in a near lockdown. The local press was frustrated with this “shroud of secrecy (162). One member of the press, Jim Seymore, reached Lower by phone, but he gave no information about the donor and little about the recipient. The Associated Press, not the locals, first named the recipient. Journalists wondered about the secrecy. This heart transplant was the 16th in the world and the ninth in the US in the past six months. Only two of the recipients were still alive.

When William Tucker found his business card among his brother’s belongings at the hospital, he was outraged. He had a bad feeling about the way his brother died. When he went to the funeral home, mortician Mac Jones informed him that Bruce’s heart and kidneys were missing from his body. When Mac had phoned to tell Bruce’s mother this news, she screamed.

The first newspaper accounts of the transplant were based mainly on MCV’s version of events. However, an African American newspaper questioned MCV’s legal authority to conduct the transplant. The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which empowered the medical examiner to authorize the removal of the heart, had not yet taken effect. Jones notes that the field of organ transplants at the time was a “baffling place where rules were made on the fly” (179). Doctors and hospitals were typically not held accountable for their decisions given their prestige.

The local press finally got Bruce Tucker’s name when Mac Jones called about his obituary and mentioned that he was the organ donor. Bev Orndorff, a local journalist, then published Bruce’s name and was immediately deemed an outcast at MCV. However, Orndorff did not exploit the racial angle or the fact that a Black man’s heart was taken without permission and given to a white man. The Washington Post did, noting that it was the first interracial transplant. MCV’s victory transformed into a public relations disaster. Going on the counteroffensive, MCV claimed that its policy was to keep the names of donors anonymous. Jones notes the irony of MCV using “its privacy policy to justify its lack of transparency with the Tucker family” (183). By this time, the Tucker family had retained Wilder as legal counsel. Although he was a solo attorney, he had strong rhetorical skills and routinely defended powerless Black people.

Once again, the 1884 law to promote medical science and protect graves became relevant. That law allowed the state health department to assign a body to a medical school or to surgeons if there was no next of kin. Orndorff, the journalist, raised the question of whether MCV had satisfied the mandate to make reasonable efforts to contact Bruce Tucker’s relatives. If a reasonable search yielded no results, the medical examiner could turn a body over to surgeons. The Washington Post also questioned whether approval had been properly obtained but was not sympathetic to Bruce Tucker.

An African American councilman, Howard H. Carwile, proposed a city ordinance requiring a family’s permission for transplants. While the law did not pass, Jones explains that it highlighted the “widening gap between the world views of Richmond’s black and white citizens” (186). African Americans had little trust in the medical system. Conversely, the local press, in a glowing appraisal that Jones notes reflected popular white sentiment, published what amounted to a “love letter” to MCV in early June, taking pride in its medical accomplishments and celebrating its merger with the Richmond Professional Institute, which formed a new entity: Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).