Online Browsing Helped Trigger UC Irvine Probe

It was a lucky click of a computer mouse that led UC Irvine supervisors to wonder whether something might be amiss with their willed body program.

Surfing the Internet in June, the chairman of the department that oversees the program stumbled upon a site touting an anatomy course at a nearby private learning center. The company said it used human cadavers for students hoping to enter medical school.

Wondering how a private school could obtain bodies, which are usually restricted to higher learning and medical institutions, department Chairman Richard T. Robertson asked a colleague to call the company, Replica Notes. The supplier, Robertson said his colleague was told, was Robertson’s own department.

“That was my first inkling that something was wrong,” Robertson, the chairman of UC Irvine Medical School’s department of anatomy and neurobiology, said Monday. “I couldn’t imagine how it would be legal to do that, how this private company would get a human body. . . . It just seems macabre.”

The Web page discovery followed a recent routine audit that hinted at possible bookkeeping problems with the program. Robertson said he also was suspicious of a trip that the program’s director, Christopher Brown, had just made to Arizona.

Acting quickly, Robertson asked for a formal investigation into the program, which ultimately uncovered the allegedly improper sale of body parts.

Last week, the university announced that staff members may have failed to return cremated remains to families and that Brown had been fired.

Brown has told The Times that he did nothing wrong.

The district attorney’s office is investigating whether staff members violated any criminal laws.

University officials said they have no evidence that bodies were supplied to Replica Notes, but acknowledge that the program’s poor record keeping hinders any attempt to find out which institutions received bodies.

UC Irvine investigators are trying to determine whether Brown had a financial interest in any of the companies that worked with the program. They also are looking at whether the owner of Replica Notes had an interest in two transportation companies that provided services to the program.

One of the companies, Harry’s Transport, had a contract to transport the program’s cadavers to other medical and educational institutions until June, university officials said.

California secretary of state records list Jeffrey Frazier as the owner of Harry’s and Replica Notes. For a short time last year, Brown was a part owner of Harry’s.

The second transportation company, University Health Services, was paid $5,000 for the delivery of six spines to an Arizona hospital for medical research--a payment that should have been made to UC Irvine, university officials contend.

University Health Services shares the same address--just off UC Irvine’s campus--as Harry’s Transport, a spokeswoman at St. Joseph Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix said.

Frazier was not available for comment Monday, despite repeated attempts by The Times to reach him.

Investigators at the district attorney’s office and the university are focusing on the alleged sale of body parts to St. Joseph’s, but the scope of the probe may expand.

“It could be more widespread than it appears on the surface, but the investigation will discover that,” said district attorney’s spokeswoman Tori Richards.

Meanwhile, university officials said they are trying to restore records and implement safeguards to prevent such problems in the future.

UC Irvine receives about 75 cadavers a year for use in scientific research. It uses 50 to 55 of them, and the rest are sent to other colleges and hospitals, which pay a preparation fee. Only a small percentage of donors ask that their remains be returned to their families.

By late Monday, about 30 people had called a UC Irvine hotline set up to field calls from relatives of donors anxious about the scandal.