This is one of those stories that is both sad and infuriating at the same damn time.
Kelvin Moore was an inmate at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, the Donaldson Correctional Facility, Limestone Correctional Facility, and two others while serving a 99-year sentence for two counts of attempted murder, one count each of burglary, assault, and kidnapping. According to new reporting by Andscape, on July 21, 2023, 90 minutes after speaking to him on the phone, Kelvin’s mother Agolia Moore was informed by the chaplain at Limestone that her 43-year-old son had died from an overdose of fentanyl. Despite being stricken with grief, Ms. Moore’s eyebrow raised at a question that the chaplain asked…
“He said, ‘Who’s over him?’ ” Agolia Moore, 82, said when I met with her in Mobile. “I said, ‘I am. I’m his mother.’ I said, ‘He has no wife. No kids. I am over him.’ ”
Less than a week later, after the University of Alabama at Birmingham performed an autopsy on Kelvin’s body, the local mortician in the family’s home of Mobile, Alabama took custody of his remains and noticed that many of his major organs had been removed. To say that the family was incensed and confused is an understatement. So much so that even on his deathbed a few months after his son’s passing, Kelvin’s father Johnnie told Agolia to find out what happened to their son.
“My husband was on his deathbed but he said, ‘Lo. There’s something wrong about what happened to Kelvin. It’s not right.’ He said, ‘Stick with it,’ and we’re going to stick with it,” she said.
Even after Samuel Jackson Mortuary and an angry Simone Moore, Kelvin’s brother, contacted UAB to demand his proper remains they were told flat-out that the school was keeping the organs for “further study”. To put it plainly, this is not a thing. Medical schools and educational programs have to be granted permission by the family to keep organs. Even “body brokers” who facilitate the transactions between medical research parties and families have to adhere to this legal tenet. Under no circumstances can an entity or person harvest body parts by saying, “Ah, well, this person is dead and doesn’t need them anymore”.
That’s not how any of this works.
Flip the page to read more disturbing details about the allegations against UAB.