Doctor Receives the Heart of an Unidentified Donor : Transplant, County’s Second, Comes After Man Dies of Injuries

Surgeons at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian transplanted the heart of an unidentified man into a former staff physician at the Newport Beach facility late Wednesday about seven hours after two other Hoag doctors declared the donor brain dead.

The patient, identified as Dr. Norton Humphreys, a 58-year-old retired family practitioner from Fountain Valley, was in stable condition and resting comfortably Thursday following the five-hour operation, hospital officials said.

It was the second heart transplant in Orange County history, and it came less than two weeks after the first, which was performed April 8 at UCI Medical Center in Orange.

The unidentified donor is a Latino, believed to be about 18 to 23 years old, and possibly an illegal alien from Mexico, Costa Mesa police said.

Found With Head Injuries

The donor was found lying unconscious with severe head injuries on the sidewalk outside a Costa Mesa Circle K convenience store about 5 a.m. Tuesday, police said.

The man, who had no identification and only $9.14 in cash in his pockets, was brought to Hoag, less than two miles away, where he underwent brain surgery at 7 a.m. Tuesday, hospital officials said. He was found to have suffered massive brain damage and was placed on life support systems, hospital officials said.

He was declared dead at 11:40 a.m. Wednesday and that evening, at 6:30, the transplant operation on Humphreys got under way, hospital officials said.

Thursday, at a news conference at Hoag, Larry Ainsworth, the hospital’s executive vice president, said Hoag had complied with California’s Uniform Anatomical Gift Act in using the man’s heart without consent of relatives or the donor.

24-Hour Search by Police

Ainsworth noted that the donor’s heart had been removed only after “Costa Mesa police had spent 24 hours searching for the man’s family.”

Although the man “appeared to be (Latino), and possibly illegal, and possibly from Mexico,” according to Ainsworth, he said the search had not extended to Mexico because there was no legal requirement for that.

Dr. Douglas R. Zusman, one of the two cardiac surgeons who performed the heart transplant, said that it was “rare” to use the heart of an unidentified donor. But he added that he had done so once before at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto.

Cocaine and alcohol were found in the donor’s urine, Zusman said. Cocaine can cause heart attacks and affect the blood flow, but the drug’s presence did not hinder the transplant, the doctor said.

Zusman said he decided to use the heart despite knowing relatively little about the donor’s health, because tests showed that the man did not have infectious diseases such as hepatitis or AIDS.

It was Hoag’s first heart transplant. Zusman said that neither eagerness to launch Hoag’s program nor a desire to save the life of a doctor affiliated with the hospital were factors in either the decision to declare the donor brain dead or the choice of a recipient for the heart, since Humphreys already was at the top of a regional list of potential transplant recipients.

“I met Dr. Humphreys just four months ago,” Zusman said. “We evaluated him as we would anyone who was a candidate for transplants.

“We don’t see where there is a conflict just because he happens to be an individual from the hospital,” he said.

Dr. Aidan A. Raney, the other leader of Hoag’s heart transplant team, said Hoag physicians did not act hastily in declaring the donor brain dead.

“The donor had suffered a massive subdural hematoma, or blood clots in the brain,” Raney said. “The neurosurgeon who operated on him found that he had suffered major damage to his upper brain.

“Following surgery, the neurosurgeon made the evaluation that this individual would never function again as a normal human being. His brain stem was preserved but the blood flow had been so constricted that the brain could not function,” he said.

Raney added that after the affects of the anesthesia that had been administered to the donor during surgery had worn off, the neurosurgeon and another physician, neither of whom he identified, conducted a number of technical tests required by state law that led them to conclude that the man was brain dead.

Recipient List Checked

Before transplanting the donor’s heart into Humphreys, Raney said, Hoag checked to make sure that there was no one else in greater need of a transplant in the area.

He said that the Regional Organ Procurement Agency of Southern California informed Hoag that Humphreys was at the top of the list. Humphreys, who has been on the recipient list since Jan. 9, was hospitalized at Hoag a month ago in unstable condition and had been deteriorating rapidly before Wednesday’s operation.

Raney added that a representative of the Los Angeles-based procurement agency, which allocates donor organs for the area, came to Hoag and gave permission for the transplant to occur.

A pathologist from the Orange County coroner’s office also approved of the transplant and was present during the operation, he said.

Humphreys was forced to retire from his family practice in 1980 because of his worsening heart condition, hospital officials said. As a result of the transplant, said Dr. Michael C. McNalley, who has been Humphreys’ physician since 1972, it is possible that Humphreys may recover sufficiently to be able to return to his medical practice.

Humphreys previously came to public attention in 1975 when he lost a so-called “wrongful life” lawsuit that was brought by an Anaheim woman who claimed that she gave birth to a daughter because he had failed to correctly perform an abortion.

An Orange County Superior Court jury awarded $25,600 to Alexia Mechikoff and her daughter, Asia Alexandra Mechikoff, then 3.

During the 10-day trial, Mechikoff testified that Humphreys in August, 1971, had failed to successfully abort her pregnancy.

Humphreys and others testified during the trial that Mechikoff had been instructed by the doctor to return within a week after the surgery for a checkup. But he testified that Mechikoff did not do so until it was too late to perform another operation.

McNalley said Thursday that the malpractice award had not affected the high esteem in which Humphreys is held by his peers.

The heart transplant patient and his wife, Lori, have four adult children, according to a Hoag spokeswoman.

Thursday evening outside the Circle K convenience store in west Costa Mesa where the donor’s body was found, Humphrey’s stepson shook his head in wonderment.

“It’s incredible, the coincidence,” the stepson said, declining to give his name. “They found the guy right there,” he said, pointing his finger.

The family was jubilant over his stepfather’s good fortune, he added.

“He’s doing just great,” the stepson said.

Inside the store, clerk Les Kitain, 50, said Humphreys’ stepson, who lives nearby, had just stopped by to show Kitain a newspaper account of the operation.

‘Most Are Illegals’

Kitain said he knew nothing about the unidentified man found in front of the store early Tuesday. But he added that it was not unusual for many of the men in the mostly Latino and poor surrounding neighborhood not to carry identification.

“Most of them are illegals,” he said. “And they don’t have any papers.”

Many of the men gather early every morning near Placentia Avenue and 19th Street, he said, looking for work from employers passing by in trucks.

Costa Mesa Police Sgt. Sam Cordeiro said five to 10 people had been interviewed at the convenience store shortly after the man was found. “We have no witness comments to date that (indicate) there was a struggle outside there,” Cordeiro said Thursday.

An autopsy by the Orange County coroner has found that the man suffered a fractured skull that could have been caused by a blunt instrument or a fall. A final ruling on the cause of the man’s death is awaiting results of tissue and other laboratory tests, police said.

“It doesn’t appear (that he is) a transient in the sense of a person living on the streets,” he said.

The heart donor did not match the descriptions of any persons reported missing, but “we’re still checking that avenue,” Cordeiro said. Although police would not identify a man who called authorities seeking medical aid for the injured man, they said the caller did not know the donor.

Cordeiro said the man had “no signs of exterior trauma” to his body.

Times staff writers Lonn Johnston, Lanie Jones and Nancy Wride contributed to this article.