An alleged overdose of fentanyl killed Agolia Moore’s youngest son, Kelvin Moore, 43, and the chaplain of the Limestone Correctional Facility called her on July 21, 2023. Two charges of attempted murder and other felonies had kept Moore in prison since 1999.
A report shows that six days after Moore’s death, his remains were returned to his hometown, which is located approximately 350 miles away from the prison. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, which performs autopsies for the state’s Department of Corrections, was the first to receive Moore’s remains after his death in detention.
Upon arrival in Mobile, the Moore family’s mortician found that the majority of Kelvin Moore’s internal organs were gone. Samuel Jackson Mortuary made the shocking revelation that the majority of his organs were absent.
Lauren Faraino, a civil rights attorney from Birmingham, is looking into what happened to Moore’s organs. The university’s medical school is caught up in the debate. It has allegedly been performing autopsies for the state’s jail system since 2006.
Faraino stated that UAB has been harvesting organs from prisoners without their families’ knowledge or consent for a long time. Recently, a small number of families have spoken out after discovering that their relatives were returned to them without their organs.
According to two anonymous former medical students from the university, they learned in 2018 that hospital school staff were keeping organs from some inmates without their families’ permission. As a result of these concerns, an ethics committee held a hearing in September 2018 to discuss the university’s use of unconsented cadaveric organs. School administrators allegedly informed the former students that they had the green light to harvest organs from deceased inmates since they had the approval of the wardens at the institutions where the victims passed away.
To ensure that forensic specialists do not keep organs following autopsies without the consent of the next of kin, a measure was signed into law by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey in July 2021. The illegal preservation of organs from the deceased is a concern that prompted the introduction of this measure.
A news organization in the area wanted to know whether Moore’s older brother Simone was sure that he had received Kelvin’s organs from UAB. According to Moore’s older brother Simone, they refrained from opening the container, and he was unaware of its contents. The bag was buried with Kelvin.
