Portland man’s body mistakenly donated to science

PORTLAND – State Medical Examiner Karen Gunson said Monday a mistake was made when Multnomah County failed to reach the family or friends of Robert “R.J.” Anheier, whose corpse was determined to be “unclaimed” and then given away for medical use in January.

“We try to be very careful about this,” Gunson said. “Obviously we want to identify the next of kin.”

The mix-up, first reported Sunday by the Oregonian newspaper, occurred after Anheier collapsed on a downtown Portland street, blocks from the low-income hotel where he was staying after being homeless for many years.

The Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s office determined that Anheier’s body was “unclaimed” and gave it to Oregon Health & Science University.

A trip to the man’s building would have revealed that a friend and a sister were his emergency contacts.

“I don’t want this happening to anybody else’s family member,” said Diane Anheier, of Florida, the sister who reconnected with Anheier in recent years but only learned this month that he was dead. “It’s terrible. This has been a nightmare.”

Gunson said the medical examiner’s office should have gone the extra step of visiting his home, but the short-staffed office thought it had reached a family member and stopped the search there.

Gunson said staff spent hours trying to track down Anheier’s family, using a birth certificate and an identification card he had on him when he died.

Staff contacted a social worker and hospitals where Anheier had been treated and tried to find any emergency contacts he listed there, to no avail. They searched records and thought they’d found a distant cousin when they spoke with Jeff Anheier, of San Jose, Calif.

The man said he recognized the names of Anheier’s parents as the brother and sister-in-law of his grandfather, who was also deceased. He declined to handle arrangements for Anheier and said there were few family members left and he didn’t believe they’d be interested either but would check. Two days later, the man called back and said he no longer believed he was a relative.

The medical examiner’s office protocol is to send a body to a willing funeral home when the person does not have next of kin or a family does not want to handle arrangements.

Under state law, the funeral home must first offer the body to Oregon Health & Science University for its use or cremate the corpse. It is illegal to buy or sell bodies, but a state fund does provide a nominal amount to funeral homes to defray costs of such cases.

So for $37.50, a Portland funeral home provided Anheier’s body to OHSU.

OHSU spokesman George Mason said the body has been stored in a freezer because there were no anatomy classes in session. Only a fraction of the bodies it uses for education are from people who are otherwise unclaimed. Most are donated.

OHSU said the body is being returned to the family, and owners of the funeral home say they have reimbursed the state the $37.50.