Lying on top of an operating room table with his chest exposed, Larry Black Jr. was moments away from having his organs harvested when a doctor ran breathlessly into the room.
“Get him off the table,” the doctor recalled telling the surgical team at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital as the team cleaned Black’s chest and abdomen. “This is my patient. Get him off the table.”
At first, no one recognized Zohny Zohny in his surgical mask. Then he told the surgical team he was the neurosurgeon assigned to Black’s case. Stunned by his orders, the team members pushed back, Zohny said, explaining that they had consent from the family to remove Black’s organs.
“I don’t care if we have consent,” Zohny recalled telling them. “I haven’t spoken to the family, and I don’t agree with this. Get him off the table.”
Black, his 22-year-old patient, had arrived at the hospital after getting shot in the head on March 24, 2019. He remembers running a block before collapsing. “I didn’t know I was shot at first,” Black said later.
When his sister Macquel Payne found him, he was on the ground near her apartment complex. Before an ambulance took him away, he reassured her: “I’m good, sis. I’m OK.”
In the hospital, family members noticed him blinking and tapping the bed in response to questions. “It’s like he was too alert,” Payne recalled. “He was letting us know: ‘Please don’t let them do this to me. I’m here. I can fight this.’”
Yet days later, Black was taken to surgery to have his organs removed for donation — even though his heart was beating and he hadn’t been declared brain-dead, Zohny said.
The family had been approached about organ donation. Black had listed himself as a donor on his ID. “I remember my mom saying, ‘Not right now,’” Payne said. “It’s kind of too soon.” Despite their hesitation, they ultimately consented after being told Black was at “the end of the road.” They even walked beside him for an honor walk, believing it was his “last walk of life.”
But Black was not gone.
Today, he is 28, a musician and the father of three. He still needs regular therapy for lingering health issues from the gun injury, and he said he is haunted by what he remembers from those days in a medically induced coma.
“I heard my mama yelling,” he recalled. “Everybody was there yelling my name, crying, playing my favorite songs, sending prayers up.”
He tried to show them he was fighting: “I got to hitting my hand on the side of the ICU bed,” he said.
Organ transplants save a growing number of lives in the U.S. every year, with more than 48,000 transplants performed in 2024, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. But organ donation has also faced criticism, including reports of patients showing alertness before planned organ harvesting.
A recent federal investigation into a Kentucky nonprofit found medical providers had planned to procure the organs of 73 patients despite signs of neurological activity. Those procedures ultimately didn’t take place, but federal officials vowed in July to overhaul the transplant system.
“Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”
Even before that probe, Black’s case convinced Zohny that the system needed change.
“There was no bad guy in this. It was a bad setup. There’s a problem in the system,” he said. “We need to look at the policies and make some adjustments to them to make sure that we’re doing organ donation for the right person at the right time in the right place, with the right specialists involved.”
LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who was not involved with the case but reviewed Black’s records, questioned whether his treatment was shaped by his gunfire injury. Young Black men are disproportionately victims of gun violence, Punch said, and Black’s experience exemplifies “the general neglect” of Black men’s bodies.
The hospital declined to discuss Black’s case. SSM Health’s Kim Henrichsen, president of Saint Louis University Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital-St. Louis, said the system approaches “all situations involving critical illness or end-of-life care with deep compassion and respect.”
Mid-America Transplant, the federally designated organ procurement organization for the region, does not comment on individual donor cases. But Lindsey Speir, the group’s executive vice president, said the group has walked away from cases when patients’ conditions changed.
“It definitely happens multiple times a year,” she said, adding that the industry is “losing public trust right now. And we’re going to have to regain that.”
Within two days of Zohny’s intervention, Black woke up and spoke, the doctor said. Within a week, he was standing.
“I had to learn how to walk, how to spell, read,” Black said. “I had to learn my name again, my Social, birthday, everything.”
Zohny called the fact they stopped the organ donation in time “an absolute miracle.”
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