New Law requires family notification before autopsies

BALDWIN COUNTY, Ala. (WPMI) — They took her son's heart and now one Baldwin County mother has won her battle to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.

A new Alabama law signed by Governor Kay Ivey stops doctors and forensic researchers from taking organs without "next of kin" notification.

It was a five year struggle for justice. " If an autopsy is done you have to ask questions, you want that autopsy and you got to fight to get it. I called every week to get that autopsy report," said Donna Atkin's whose son Justin Crooks died of a heart aneurysm in 2007.

It wasn’t until she filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2013 that she found out doctors and researchers had taken her son's heart without permission.

"I would have agreed to them keeping his heart and studying it to help somebody I would have agreed to that but I wasn’t given that choice that was taken from me they just took it," said Atkins.

In Alabama a 15 year old can sign up to be an organ donor with the condition a parent or next of kin be notified. Atkins says that did not happen here and to make things worse her son at 17 had never signed up as an organ donor.

It’s been a week since Governor Ivey signed Senate Bill 22 into law. Atkins says the original version would have made it a felony not to notify next of kin, but after three years of lobbying lawmakers and re-writing the bill the end result is a tribute to her son and what other families may have been through.

" I thank you Governor Ivey for doing the right and moral thing. I truly from the bottom of my heart you have no idea what that signature meant to me," said Atkins.

Atkins says her persistence as a mother has paid off, though the felony designation was stripped from the original bill, she says it's still a victory that parental consent must be given before an organ can be taken.

The new law will take effect July 1.