Organ Donations Meant When Ricky Brock Died, Others Lived

REDDING, CA — Richard Cecil Lee Brock was in a tough place. He'd reached the point where he was making bad decisions that would cascade into worse. The 41-year-old was living in Corning, California, not homeless but not staying anywhere in particular. It had been a while since he had a steady job. There had been stints at Home Depot, a local sawmill. Mostly, it was manual labor, doing occasional day work for some contractors.

He also spent a lot of time on his motorcycle, which he loved. He also loved his five kids, even though he no longer had custody of the ones who were not yet adults. While the younger ones had been adopted and were being cared for by his brother and family, Ricky — as his family called him — didn't take it well.

It started a downward spiral for him. His mother would say he ended up hanging with a proverbial “rough crowd.”

For Ricky, drugs and alcohol became a thing. He was no longer going to church, something that he had also loved. There were arrests — never anything serious, but he was building a record.

The night of July 3, 2017, was just another night for him. A trip to a bar, maybe having one too many. Then just before midnight, he hopped back on his motorcycle. He didn’t have identification on him. His decision to drive was not a wise one for him.

Just before midnight, Shasta County emergency dispatch received a 911 call from a couple of homeless people. They had come upon Ricky and his motorcycle, which had crashed along Highway 273 in Anderson. He was clearly in bad shape — there was little recognizable left of the motorcycle — but he was alive.

Emergency units arrived and rushed him to Mercy Medical Center Redding. The prognosis was not good. Doctors fought to keep him alive. But by July 7, it was clear that it was a losing battle. They were no longer able to discern any brain activity.

The hospital was somehow able to determine that Ricky was an organ donor. A call was made to the local organ procurement organization, one of the groups chartered by the federal government to match donated organs with the people who need them. The clock was ticking. They would be able to keep Ricky alive for only so long before the organs would start to fail and become useless. In the best of circumstances, the heart, kidney, pancreas, liver and lungs can be donated.

It takes time to line up recipients, so the hospital moved quickly.

What they didn’t move on as quickly was finding Ricky’s next of kin.

That’s What He Wanted

At 3 a.m. July 7, Renee Juarez, Ricky’s mom, woke up with a start. She’d had a bad dream that her son had died. It wasn’t the first time that she had had a version of that dream.

“For more than a year, I’d been having dreams about him passing away,” Renee said. “I knew that my son was on the road to destruction. It’s taken me a long time to accept this, to stop feeling guilty, but there was nothing I could do about Ricky doing the things Ricky did.”

Renee tried to shake off the dream but couldn’t. She called her other son.

“Something’s wrong with Ricky,” I told him. “He told me, ‘Mom, you’re always having bad dreams about him. It’s going to be OK.’ I said it wasn’t OK. Something’s wrong.”

Renee then went to her office.

“No sooner than I got signed into my computer, my phone rang,” she said. “It was the hospital. They asked me to come to the hospital to identify Ricky. They told me he’d been brought in on the 4th and I was really angry, because he was there the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th.

“When I saw him in the hospital, the doctors told me all of his bones had been broken, that there really had been nothing that they could do. That first time I saw him, I slapped him and yelled, 'Wake up, wake up!' — which, of course, he wasn’t going to do. But, you know, it was traumatic.”

Looking back, she said that it was probably better that she hadn’t known right away about what what had happened.

“Maybe it was God’s intervention, making sure that I didn’t have to be there longer than I had to,” she said.

Renee said that over the last few months of his life, Ricky had been hanging “out with some really bad people, but he never once brought that to his mother's or family's house. He kept the bad away from us. Every now and then, I’d send him money through Safeway or go bring him home so he could shower.

“I wanted him to get things together for him to succeed. And he would often say the right things, especially after his brother adopted his daughters. He would talk about wanting to get his daughters back.”

Renee said those conversations would inevitably become difficult.

“I would have to be tough,” she said. “I would tell him that he can’t just talk about what he wants to do, he has to follow through. He can’t just talk the talk, he needed to walk the walk. The last time we talked, I said, 'You can't say you're gonna do this, you know, think that everything's gonna go your way because the words come out of your mouth.'

“I said that you have to prove it. And so, you know, he was angry with me. And, you know, and I told him, I said, 'I love you.' And then we hung up, and I didn't speak to him again.”

Given the crowd that her son had been hanging out with, Renee said she assumed that Ricky had also been heavy into drugs.

“The doctors told me that didn’t seem to be the case,” she said. “They said that his organs were in really good shape and that if he’d been a heavy drug user, that wouldn’t have been the case.”

The doctor telling Renee about the state of Ricky’s organs was the first that she had heard of him being donor.

“I had no idea,” she said. “It was hard to hear at first, but it was something that he had wanted.”

During a previous hospital stay, Ricky had given his mom the responsibility for medical decisions.

“At one point as they prepared to donate his organs, his ex-wife tried to stop it from happening,” Renee said. “The hospital had to tell her that she had no say in this, and they asked me if I wanted to move forward. Sometimes I wonder if he felt he was at the end of his rope but wanted to make sure that he could make a difference.

“I told the doctors that Ricky wanted to be an organ donor. That’s what he wanted. That’s what I want for him.”

That put in motion plans officially to start the donation process. There would be tests to make sure there were no hidden problems with the organs and samples taken to establish genetic markers that could be matched with people on the waiting list for an organ.

Ricky Brock would be counted among the 10,281 deceased donors who contributed to 34,768 transplants performed in 2017.

The Current System Is ‘Dysfunctional’

While those numbers may seem impressive, when you start diving a little deeper, the direness of the situation becomes obvious. As of July 7, 2021, there were 107,120 people waiting for an organ transplant in the United States; most of them are waiting for kidneys.

Since 2021 started, just about 21,000 transplants have been performed. But 33,758 people have been added to the waiting list — roughly 181 people every day.

On top of that, an average of 33 people each day die waiting for an organ transplant.

U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from the Chicago area, recently chaired a hearing in Washington on “The Urgent Need to Reform the Organ Transplantation System to Secure More Organs for Waiting, Ailing, and Dying Patients”

He said that the organ procurement organizations — such as the one that Mercy hospital in Redding called when Ricky’s organs were ready to be donated — are to blame.

“They play a key role in organ transplants,” Krishnamoorthi said at the hearing, adding that the current OPO system is “dysfunctional” and allows the organizations to “fail the communities they serve.”

Krishnamoorthi said that “for years, OPOs have faced no outside incentive to perform. They evaded public scrutiny, refusing to reveal data showing their success and failure, hiding behind a wall of jargon and obfuscation. Each OPO enjoys a regional monopoly, with no competition. No OPO has ever lost its certification, no matter how poorly performing.

“They set for themselves disappointingly low expectations, then congratulate each other for lackluster results with high executive salaries and mutual invitations to lavish board retreats.”

During the hearing, he cited several examples of OPO failures, including one that delivered lungs for transplant without testing them for COVID-19. They were infected, and the patient who received them died from the virus.

Krishnamoorthi’s hearing was held to help focus attention on a new federal rule that creates metrics by which OPOs will be judged and creates a situation where competition could occur.

The rule doesn’t go into effect until 2026 and is only expected to increase the number of transplants by 7,300 each year. Remember, every day, 33 people die waiting for a transplant — so 33 x 365 = 12,045 people who die every year.

The rule change could mean fewer deaths. But it will still leave the United States watching as roughly 4,745 people die every year. Waiting.

As Patch has reported, efforts are underway to increase the number of available organs. A poll three years ago found that 95 percent of adults favor organ donation, but only 54 percent of people are actually registered to donate.

Most of those people — such as Ricky — sign up when they get their driver’s licenses. The current system allows people to opt in to the donor program. Some initiatives look to change that — make it so people are automatically enrolled and would have to opt out.

"I don't know that this is the ultimate solution, but if it helps save at least one more life, isn't it worth exploring?" Ken Zuckerbrot, a lawyer and kidney transplant recipient, told Patch in 2018. "There has to be a better way than there is now.”

‘What You Received Was A Gift’

The evening of July 9, 2017 — two days after Ricky’s brain had stopped functioning and doctors were scrambling to find patients who could take his organs — a 50-year-old man sat with his wife on the couch of their home in Portland, Oregon, about 420 miles north.

His kidneys had failed. He’d spent five and a half years on dialysis, the process by which a machine does what kidneys are supposed to: clean your blood. It involves sitting in a chair for four to six hours, three times a week, with two needles in your arms. It’s not fun.

He and his wife knew that he was close to getting a kidney. He’d been told to stay close and make sure his phone was charged.

As they sat on the couch, the phone rang. He joked to his wife that maybe this was the call that they’d been dreaming of.

It was. A kidney had been found. It was a perfect match. Two days later — on July 11 — he had a new kidney. Ricky Brock’s kidney.

He and his wife wrote letters of gratitude to Brock’s family, though they didn’t know to whom they were writing. Then, the man — a reporter — wrote of his experience, how he would dream almost every night about who the donor could be.

For three years, they heard nothing from Ricky’s family, which was not unusual. They had been through a horrible trauma, and the reporter — me — was resigned to never knowing.

On Aug. 13, 2020, I got an email from Ricky’s nephew saying that he had seen my story and that his grandmother, Ricky’s mother Renee, had also seen it and wanted to talk. The nephew said that she would understand if I didn’t want to chat.

I assured him that I most definitely did and called Renee the next day.

“I really appreciated the letters that you and your wife had sent me,” she said, adding that I was one of five people to receive one of Ricky’s organs. “Particularly your wife’s. Yours was wonderful, showing how grateful you were, but hers was about you.

“I got to know you. I got to know who Colin is, and I really appreciated that.”

Renee told me how she’d been in Tucson taking care of her brother when she noticed that he was reading a story — my story. And it rang all sorts of bells, reminding her of the letters that we had written. One thing led to another, and soon I was reading the note from her grandson.

“I didn’t want to force myself on you,” she said. “I didn’t want you to think that some crazy lady was thinking her son lives inside of you. I just wanted you to know that I’d read your story, read some of your stuff, and was very happy that Ricky’s kidney had found a good home.

“I also read about how you were dealing with feelings of guilt because while you’d been given a new chance at life, someone else had died. You need to know that you don’t have a debt to anyone. What you received was a gift.”

Renee added that the fact I live in Portland makes the donation that much more special.

"Ricky was born in Portland," she said. "I think you having his kidney is a nice homecoming for him, bringing him back to when life was fun for him."