Vanessa Webb was just 17 when she was found dead inside her bedroom.
Her death was as suspicious as it was sudden. And her grief-stricken family only hoped for answers.
Almost two years later, however, they say the answers were swept away when the Lorain County Coroner failed to perform a full autopsy.
Instead, the coroner helped Lifebanc harvest vital organs that may have contained vital clues to the teen's death.
This week, the Amherst family filed a lawsuit against the Lorain County Coroner’s Office and Lifebanc.
The suit contends Lifebanc, in its urgency to obtain the teen’s organs, rushed the family into donating. And in the process, the coroner –- who helped facilitate the donation -- failed to determine how the teen died.
Neither the county nor Lifebanc would comment on the suit filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
Heather A. Mekesa, Lifebanc’s chief hospital and clinical services officer, however, said the organization sympathizes with the Webb family.
She also called organ donors heroes, whose generosity helps countless other families.
“We do not provide a financial incentive to anyone we work with, including hospitals, the coroner and transplant centers,” Mekesa said.
The family’s attorney Roni Sokol said Lifebanc and deputy coroner Dr. Frank Miller rushed Webb’s mother into donating the teen’s organs and led her to believe the donation would not compromise the autopsy.
Sokol said the Lifebanc phone calls to Webb’s mother –- in the hours after her death –- show a lack of compassion and an urgency to get the donation.
"When you hear the recordings, it sounds almost cruel to do that to a parent who just lost a child,” Sokol said. "She did not know that donating Vanessa's organs would equate to not knowing the cause of death.”
In one phone call obtained by the Investigator Tom Meyer, a Lifebanc representative speaks to Vanessa’s mother, Jennifer Stewart.
“Are you feeling OK,” the caller asks the mother.
“As best as I can,” she replied.
“Numb and just surviving, huh?” the caller asks.
“Yes.”
“OK…do you have family and support there with you?”
“Oh, yeah,” the mother said.
“OK. OK. All right. Jennifer, if this is OK, I’d like to start the paperwork.”
In an interview last year, Lorain County Coroner Dr. Stephen Evans defended the office’s work.
“We’re not satisfied that a 17-year-old died for no good reason,” he said.
Some of Vanessa’s organs, including her heart, were donated to Lifebanc. The family contends Lorain officials believed the girl died of a drug overdose and released the body based on that assumption.
Blood tests disproved the theory, leaving a cause of death undetermined. Suicide and foul play have been ruled out.
“I don’t understand how you can donate someone’s organs before you do an autopsy,” said Stewart.