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SAN LUIS OBISPO, California-A California woman is filing a complaint in the San Luis Obispo County Superior Court against an organ transplant doctor and the Sierra Vista hospital for willfully deceiving her and murdering her physically handicapped son for the purpose of harvesting his organs. Mrs. Navarro is the mother and only surviving family of her son Ruben, who was stricken with Adrenal Leukodystrophy, a rare disorder that left him confined to a wheelchair.The court papers allege that last January, 26-year old Ruben was transferred to the Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center due to a medical issue. Ms. Navarro went to visit him at the hospital where she was led to believe that Dr. Hootan Roozrokh was Ruben's "treating doctor".According to the complaint,he was actually working for a California organ-harvesting corporation.The complaint also states that Roozrokh told Navarro words to the effect that,"There is nothing that can be done for your son. He is going to die." She was also falsely informed that according to hospital policy, the plug on her son's respirator had to be pulled after 5 days. Greatly distressed and having been led to believe that her son had no chance of survival, Ms. Navarro says she agreed to donate his organs. At no point, however, did she consent to the removal of life-support.The complaint documents describe the following events, saying that Hospital medical staff took Ruben into the operating room where they removed the respirator. He kept breathing, however, and his heart continued to beat. At the direction of his "treating doctor,"Ruben was administered a lethal dose of morphine and Ativan. He continued to live, however, and the doctor said (as quoted by witnesses in the complaint), "Let's give him some more candy."After several doses of morphine, the doctors gave up, wheeled him away and left him to die without life support where he died nine hours later. According to LifeSiteNews.com Medical Advisor Dr. John Shea, the debate about whether to harvest organs usually surrounds a comatose person, a victim of a car-crash for example, who is hovering between life and death. In this case, however, it appears that Ruben was not necessarily going to die.The question of when a person actually dies and when or if it is ethical to remove their organs is highly debated. As Shea explained, people can be brought back to life even fifteen minutes after their heart has stopped beating. Since the notion of cardiac death was developed in 1993, he said, there has been a significant increase in the number of organs harvested. In fact, the number of "non-beating" heart donations-people who may not have actually died-more than doubled between 2003-2007 in the United States. As in the days of Noah...
