LA VOZ DE AZTLAN
Los Angeles, Alta California
October 28, 2009

Los Angeles homeless are mysteriously
disappearing despite recession

Henry Reid, UCLA's Director of the Willed Body Program at right. Ernest Nelson, body parts dealer at left

The Los Angeles County's homeless population has dropped 38% since 2007 despite a deep economic recession says the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The drop in the homeless population of the downtown Los Angeles Skid Row area is even greater. Authorities report that the Skid Row area lost nearly 50% of its homeless population, or from 22,030 homeless in 2007 to 11,093 in 2009. In other words, approximately 10,937 indigent, mostly drug addicted and mentally sick, persons have disappeared from Los Angeles Skid Row in two years. This is at a time when the Skid Row population should have at least doubled because of the major economic downturn say homeless population experts.

There have been a few theories proposed that attempt to explain the phenomena. One is particularly bizarre and macabre but plausible. In 1992 the New York Times in an article titled, "Colombia Shuts Medical School In Body-Purchase Case" reported that the Colombian government had closed a medical school where security guards were said to have murdered homeless people and sold the bodies to the Free University of Barranquilla for body parts and medical experimentation. The police believed university security guards clubbed street people to death and sold their bodies to the medical school for about $200 each.

Unfortunately the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) was involved recently in a similar scandal. In 2004 Henry Reid, UCLA's Director of the Willed Body Program was arrested for selling body parts that were meant for university medical research to body parts dealer Ernest Nelson. The body parts dealer confessed that he paid Reid over $700,000 for permission to go into the UCLA body freezer and hack about 800 cadavers into pieces to take their parts. One cadaver can produce as much as $200,000 dollars when cut up and individual body parts and tissues are sold to the pharmaceutical and medical industries.

Ernest Nelson provided documentation to authorities that indicated that UCLA Medical Center administrators and high level UCLA executives had knowledge of the clandestine sale of body parts and approved it. It appears that Henry Reid, two other employees under his supervision, and others at the UCLA Medical Center got away with trafficking in body parts by keeping some of the donated cadavers off the books. Henry Reid and the others may have been accepting cadavers that they never recorded.

Can what occurred at the Free University of Barranquilla in Colombia occur here. Certainly, criminals in the USA have killed for a lot less than $200,000 dollars per victim. The skid Row homeless are easy targets. No one knows them, they have no family to miss them and they sleep in dark alleys. Let's see . . . 10,937 winos, hobos, druggies, crazies disappeared. . . times $200,000 . . . why that's over 2 Billion dollars. Will the LAPD investigate? Probably not!

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Related:

L.A. Lady Lives in Skid Row Porta-Potty