TJ Hoover — Declared Dead, Awake Before Organ Recovery (2021)

Anthony 'TJ' Hoover II, then 36, was brought to Baptist Health Richmond in Kentucky in October 2021 after a drug overdose. Four days later, by WDRB's account of the records, staff determined he was brain dead. He was a registered organ donor, on his driver's license and in the national registry, and Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates opened a donation case. His family gathered for the honor walk, the corridor procession that precedes donation. His sister, Donna Rhorer, was beside the bed: 'his eyes started opening, and not only open — they were tracking.' Hospital documentation later cited in reporting noted 'patient eyes open and tracking,' 'thrashing on the bed,' and 'purposeful movement to pain.'

That morning he was taken for a cardiac catheterization, a test of whether his heart was viable for transplant. Nyckoletta Martin, a former KODA surgical preservation coordinator who reviewed the case notes, found that 'the donor had woken up during his procedure that morning... and he was thrashing around on the table.' In the operating room, organ preservationist Natasha Miller saw it directly: 'He was moving around — kind of thrashing... you could see he had tears coming down. He was visibly crying.' The procuring surgeon refused to continue. By Miller's account, the case coordinator was then told by a supervisor to 'find another doctor to do it' and answered that there was no one else. The procedure was stopped before any incision. After about 45 minutes, a doctor came out and told the family: 'I stopped it, he's not ready, he woke up.'

The Dispute and the Investigations

KODA, since merged into Network for Hope, denies the pressure. 'No one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient,' said Julie Bergin, its president and chief operating officer. Baptist Health Richmond said 'The safety of our patients is always our highest priority.' The case reached the House Energy and Commerce Committee through whistleblower submissions in September 2024, NPR's investigation followed in October, and the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Kentucky attorney general's office opened reviews. By mid-2025, per WDRB's reporting on the federal review of more than 350 KODA cases, about 70 patients had neurological findings unsuitable for donation and 28 may not have been deceased when the donation process began. Dr. Raymond Lynch, an organ-policy researcher, called the findings 'unacceptable.' TJ Hoover lived. He has memory problems and difficulty walking and talking, and his sister says he carries post-traumatic stress from the experience. He has joined her in advocating for reform of the donation system. 'I feel betrayed by the fact that people... were telling us he was brain-dead, and then he wakes up,' Rhorer said.

Why This Entry Is in the Catalog

This is not a miracle claim, and no one involved has made one. It sits beside Jahi McMath and Lewis Roberts as a boundary entry: a documented case where a death determination failed — a false positive caught only because the patient woke before the first incision. Every 'declared dead, came back' story the catalog scores leans on the reliability of that determination. The federal review put a number on it — 28 possible cases in one organization's files.

Assessment

We score the entry at the floor by design. The facts are confidently documented; nothing supernatural is claimed by the family, the whistleblowers, the hospital, or the investigators. What it calibrates: when a recovery story says someone came back after being declared dead, misdetermined death is a live, federally documented rival — not a debater's hypothetical.